Ukrainian beekeeper refuses to abandon hives as Russian troops advance

FRANCE 24 English

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00:00We are near Mihnograd, just a few kilometers away from the front line.

00:04This is Sasha. He's a former resident and a beekeeper here,

00:08and in the middle of harvesting his honey. A hard task given the war raging nearby.

00:20The goal is to extract the honey as quickly as possible,

00:23prepare the bees to take them to safety, probably to the Dnipro region,

00:27because leaving them here makes no sense. They would not survive.

00:34A few months ago, Sasha almost died in the bombing of his house.

00:38Evacuated to the west of the country,

00:40he returned to Mihnograd so as not to abandon his bees and his dozens of hives.

00:45He knows that he's risking his own life, and that every day is a race against time.

00:51The front line is not far at all. You can hear everything that is happening there.

00:56It is too dangerous to stay here for the night.

01:01The calm of the moment is deceptive. Every day, Sasha and his friend Andrey

01:06make the round trip from Pavlograd, about 50 kilometers away.

01:11A throwback to the years spent here in complete peace,

01:15when the Russian bombs were still far away.

01:21Everything was perfect here. We did not have a single piece of paper lying around.

01:27It was a great time. We got up early in the morning, we saw the sunrise,

01:31the sunset, its path during the day, and how the bees started to work.

01:42Sasha knows that this harvest will probably be his last in Mihnograd.

01:48Due to the advance of the Russian troops and the destruction that accompanies them,

01:52the beekeeper knows that every moment here will soon belong only to memories.

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