"... 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. How we shielded Ksusha from the brutality of Russia's invasion, and we ourselves remained sane, became central to our lives, as my wife Lidia and I grappled with our new reality. In the first few days our city seemed frozen - I filmed the emptiness as schools stood closed, government buildings abandoned, and factories and offices empty. Most people laid low. The Russian forces, having taken Kherson, were now trying to advance on nearby Mykolaiv, and were shelling ferociously. ...”
NBC News - Cold, dark and without power: Ukraine faces outages as Russian attacks begin a long winter (Video)
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.
