Fifteen Maldivian students in Ukraine have been evacuated to neighboring Hungary.
The Maldives government has been working to repatriate Maldivian nationals in Ukraine as Russia has declared war and launched attacks against Ukraine. Until Friday night, 20 Maldivian students remained stranded in Ukraine.
The Foreign Ministry said Minister Abdulla Shahid spoke to his Hungarian counterpart and arranged for Maldivian students to cross over to Hungary. The ministry said their return to the Maldives had been arranged for two days from now.
The Foreign Ministry said eight Maldivian students remain in Kharkiv. While the government is working on evacuating them to western Ukraine, the long travel distance and the current situation make facilitating the arrangements extremely challenging, the ministry said. While five out of the eight Maldivians were students who could not depart from Ukraine due to various personal reasons, the families of the remaining three individuals alerted the Maldives Embassy in Berlin that they were in Ukraine on Friday, the ministry said.
Adding that the government is working on evacuating a Maldivian student in Dnipro to the Hungary Consulate near the Ukraine-Hungary border, the ministry said it was coordinating with countries neighboring Ukraine and other friendly countries to make the necessary arrangements.
