Warning: Distressing images of war and description of torture.
On March 1 Dmytro Bahnenko, a journalist in Kherson, southern Ukraine, watched Russian tanks roll down his street. As his world, like many Ukrainians’, turned upside down, he secretly started filming everything around him, sensing history in the making, and sharing the footage with BBC Eye.
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Over the next three months Dmytro records his city’s resistance. Acts of defiance, including large demonstrations are followed by a violent crackdown. The city changes. Food and medicine become scarce. Russian military vehicles marked with the “Z” speed up and down Kherson streets. Shelling is heard round the clock. Many people flee. Friends and prominent local people start to disappear – others are put through mock executions.
As the Russians make their intentions clearer, Dmytro and his wife Lidia struggle to shelter their five-year-old daughter Ksusha from what is happening. The documentary is filled with colourful detail of how the young family find ways of coping as their city is steadily stripped of its Ukrainian identity.
Dmytro realises just how dangerous his secret project is when a pro-Ukrainian priest he has been filming is kidnapped and tortured by unidentified men from the Russian security services.
More on the war in Ukraine here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLz_B0PFGIn4fOM5lsRoJ0liaiBorTiRvl
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