Higher education supports Ukrainians and Russians
Dutch universities and colleges come to the aid of their frustrated Ukrainian and Russian students and employees. Fundraisers and expressions of support are being held everywhere.
Image: Pixabay
A crisis team from Eindhoven University of Technology has contacted all thirty Ukrainian and one hundred Russian students and employees on the Eindhoven campus. writes Cursor. They are helped with mental problems, but also when their residence permit expires or when they are unable to withdraw money because of the war.
They can then call on an emergency fund that the university has set up and receive the money for the time being as a gift and not as a loan. In addition, a Ukraine fund is being set up with donations from former students from the university fund.
The University of Amsterdam focuses a comparable emergency fund for all affected students and the Amsterdam University Fund is organizing a crowdfunding campaign.
SaxNow reported last Tuesday that a crisis team from Saxion University of Applied Sciences tried to contact six students in Ukraine. One of them turned out to be in hiding and another was able to flee to Moldova. An as yet unknown number of students are in Russia, which is also largely cut off from the outside world due to the flight bans.
No Russian war
Ukrainian, but also Russian students and employees have been severely affected by the war. The Russian Nelly Litvak, professor of applied mathematics at the University of Twente, calls it is terrible in U-Today what is happening in Ukraine. “All the Russians around me are against this war, which has only losers. It's Putin's war, not a Russian war."
Also the Wageningen student Andrei Tertienko says that his friends back home in Russia react with horror to the war in Ukraine, despite all the propaganda with which the Russian population is bombarded on a daily basis. “The Russian government is not the people,” he tells Resource.
Support actions
Fundraising campaigns have been launched throughout the country, for example by Ukrainian students in Tilburg† They plan to truck the collected clothing, medicines, baby equipment and foodstuffs next week to a partner university of Tilburg in Lviv.
At the University of Twente, University of Amsterdam, Saxion University of Applied Sciences, Radboud University Nijmegen and the Erasmus University Rotterdam similar initiatives are underway. The Delft journalistic platform Delta made his own office available for a fundraiser of the collective Students fot Ukraine.
A benefit dinner with Ukrainian dishes in Rotterdam yielded two thousand euros and comfort for the Ukrainians present. One of the students told Erasmus Magazine that he is bad at cooking and almost never eats Ukrainian anymore. “My grandmother always makes borscht when I was back home, so this brings great memories during this difficult time.”
