MOHAMMED ISHTIAQUE KHAN

Right after Russia launched its attack on Ukraine, Bangladeshi medical student Fabiha Binte Mahbub was bunkered up in an underground subway station in the city of Kharkiv.

She is a fourth-year student of Kharkiv National Medical University.

The city -- Ukraine’s second largest -- is located in the country’s north-east. It is roughly a thousand kilometres from the Polish border.

The Russian military has been shelling Kharkiv since February 24, and the death toll is at several dozens, including an Indian medical student.

Fabiha spent the first day and a half of the Russian offence holed up underground. “The attack began at dawn. I woke up to the sound of intense shelling and found my bed shaking. I called my friends, and started crying ... It [the shelling] just wouldn’t stop,” she described.

Even though it quietened after a while, the Russians restarted the offence in the afternoon again.

“This time they were targeting missiles and mortar shells. From there on, the situation went downhill … I cannot describe in words how terrifying it is to be stuck in a bunker while the sky outside flashes with the light from explosions. At one point, we lost track of time.”

When the shelling thinned out on the second day, Fabiha and her friends emerged from the underground bunker to restock food supplies. “Within 10 minutes of coming back home for supplies, the shelling began again. We ran back to the bunker with just the clothes on our back. That is when we realised the situation would just keep getting worse, and we must find an escape route.”

Fabiha and three of her friends decided to head towards the Polish border -- but the journey was bound to be risky. How does one cross a thousand kilometres in a country at war?