As Russia scrambles to pull its civilian staff out of the city of Kherson ahead of a Ukrainian counter-offensive, Ukrainian father Dmytro Bahnenko reflects on the months he and his family lived there under occupation and secretly filmed for BBC Eye at great personal risk.
“I saw a robot today,” my five-year-old daughter Ksusha whispered to me as I filmed her underneath the table.
“It was flying… it wanted to kill me.”
It wasn’t clear what – if anything – Ksusha had seen that day to evoke the disturbing image. But evidently she was unsettled.
Nothing had been the same since Russian soldiers first marched past our window in the late afternoon of 1 March, and I began filming our lives for a BBC Eye documentary. My day job had been as a local reporter. Never did I think I would be filming an invasion of my home city – the only Ukrainian regional capital to have been captured.
