Thread by @Anastasiya1451A

How was the life of Ukrainians in the russian-occupied territories?
It was full of terror, misery or worse. Many left their homes & run for the Ukrainian-controlled areas abandoning their livelihoods just to safe their lives.
🧵A story of Dmytro, Lidia & their 5yo Ksusha:
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Ukrainian father Dmytro Bahnenko reflects on the months he and his family lived there under occupation and secretly filmed for #BBC at great personal risk.
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"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."
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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.
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The Russian forces, having taken Kherson, were now trying to advance on nearby Mykolaiv, and were shelling ferociously. We dragged our mattresses into the corridor - away from the windows - and made up games to distract Ksusha.
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The irony is that for decades Ukraine helped feed the world, but in those first few days we were struggling to get hold of the most basic items.
"I managed to get the last potatoes," one man told me wearily.
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But the people of Kherson seemed anything but resigned to their fate. Protests against the occupation began early and grew in ferocity over the following few weeks. The Russian troops appeared shocked - in their minds they had arrived as "liberators".
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"It is scary when you're driving and you're shot at - you need to get away fast," he told me.
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Meanwhile, the protests against the occupation continued, and on 21 March, the mood changed. The Russian military began spraying tear gas and lobbing stun grenades. Many people were injured.
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This was followed by a wider crackdown. Increasing numbers of people were disappearing - activists, those with links to Ukrainian authorities, journalists.
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The following night, we gathered with my pregnant sister Maryna and her husband Vitaly in the home Maryna and I had shared with our parents when we were growing up.
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Maryna did not want to give birth under occupation. And it was no longer safe for Vitaly to go to work.
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The Russian forces had stepped up their campaign to rid Kherson of its Ukrainian identity. Ukrainian flags and symbols were removed, monuments to our heroes destroyed.
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My brother-in-law Vitaly had been visited by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). He told me that one of the men handed him a hand grenade, pulled out the pin and walked away. When he returned he said laughingly that it was "just a joke".
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Another FSB officer told Vitaly to report with documentation so he and Maryna could be relocated to Crimea. They did not, of course, want to move to Russian-held Crimea.
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Maryna and Vitaly packed up and prepared to leave the next day, and we realised it now made sense for us to leave with them.
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We packed frantically. We wrote information about Ksusha, including who her guardians would be if we didn't survive, on a piece of paper which we hid in her library card holder. We hung it around her neck.
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after 34 checkpoints, we spotted a Ukrainian flag. The same colours as the fields of yellow rapeseed and blue skies we were now driving through. The colours of freedom.
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Five months on, the family are living in Kyiv. Dmytro's sister Maryna gave birth to a baby boy.
Full story at:
bbc.com/news/world-eur…