Nov 3: Kherson- Occupied and Liberated

BBC Documentary and Sky News reportage Nov 11, 2022

Before reading…

A module I teach includes terminology pertaining to warfare within the broader issue of information warfare. I shared the following documentary and Sky News report with my students. They had not seen it and were unaware of what life was like under occupation. We live in a free country, and we take that for granted. I must have cried a few times because it was heartbreaking to see normal people free one day and under occupation the next, a state of living terror.

This footage hit me particularly hard today because Kharkiv is being hit by Russian missiles in a renewed Russian offensive. The war is far from over.

I also cried when I saw the jubiliation of the Ukrainians as they were liberated—a wish we all shared for other areas still under Russian occupation.

BBC: Occupied

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.

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.

Kherson liberated

Ukrainian troops have begun arriving in the centre of the strategic city of Kherson after Russia's withdrawal - with jubilant residents celebrating their liberation. Sky's international correspondent Alex Rossi and his team were among the first foreign journalists to reach the centre since the city was retaken.