Behind the scene: FRANCE 24 gains rare access to Ukraine-controlled Kursk region in Russia

FRANCE 24 English

Visit our website: http://www.france24.com  Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FRANCE24.English  Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/France24_en

Transcript

00:00And Catherine Norris Trent is with me now. Catherine, take us a little bit

00:04behind the scenes of your reporting then. How did you find access and filming

00:09during your embed with the Ukrainian army?

00:14Hello there Nadia. We were taken in as you saw by the Ukrainian army as part of

00:20a small group of journalists, impossible to access by oneself of course and

00:26impossible for us to access via the Russian side where we haven't been

00:31given visas for quite some time. But the access, we were allowed to film whatever

00:36we wanted apart from military vehicles. The Ukrainian army was very anxious not

00:41to give away any of its locations because of course they are being

00:44targeted daily by Russian attacks in this counter offensive. Vladimir Putin

00:51has said that he wants to take back the whole of the Kursk region. It's being

00:56reported by October so it's a pretty intensive fight. You could hear some of

01:00the artillery there. There was even more off-camera. So we were allowed to speak

01:05to whichever civilians we wanted to including ones there you saw in our

01:09report who definitely hadn't yet been convinced by Ukraine's argument and we

01:15were not given restrictions on what we were allowed to broadcast from them. So

01:19in terms of the restrictions they were mainly only on the security side.

01:25Off-camera soldiers telling us look the battle is intense, it's dynamic, that was

01:30the word one of them used, so fast-moving. The situation is changing hands. We had

01:35been due to go to another location but at the last minute we couldn't go there

01:38because there were just too many attacks and one soldier told us that in the 24

01:43hours preceding our visit there'd been 80 attack drones or missiles including

01:48guide bombs fired by Russia onto what is part of its own territory inside the

01:54Kursk region. And Catherine I know that there were parts of this story that you

01:59weren't able to show us in the film itself. Tell us a bit about what we

02:02actually didn't see. I mean there were so many things we got in our very quick

02:09visit there but the civilians who are left behind are often people who are

02:13sick or elderly and often they've been cut off from their families elsewhere in

02:17the Kursk region in what is still controlled by the Russian government. So

02:22they're desperate to evacuate and they're asking to evacuate. The Ukrainian

02:26soldiers at this point are saying well you know Russia's not allowing us to and

02:30they've called for the UN and the Red Cross to have access to Kursk to assess

02:33the humanitarian needs but they want access to telephones which they say they

02:37don't have they want to be able to speak to family members. Ukraine says it's

02:42giving them food, some humanitarian aid and water trucks now so they're getting

02:48the basics of life but life for them is very difficult day to day. Of course we

02:53couldn't spend much time there with them experiencing as much as that because

02:57our trip reporting there was lasted for a few hours for security

03:02reasons. And as you said a bit earlier civilians were relatively free to talk

03:07to you, the Ukrainian army were happy for you to do that but were people in general

03:11willing to talk to you? Were they interested in speaking to foreign media?

03:19A few people weren't but surprisingly we found that most people wanted to engage

03:25with us. Some of them perhaps hadn't had much contact with the outside world, some

03:29of them thought that by speaking out maybe they could get help to evacuate as

03:33well. Some of them wanted to express their anger and you saw that pouring out

03:38on the streets now and you saw the very different vision they have of the world.

03:43Some Russians we spoke to there in the Ukrainian controlled part of Kursk for

03:51now, they said that they thought the war had started on the 6th of August, that's

03:56when Ukraine's lightning incursion into Kursk began. They didn't believe that it

04:01had started some of them on the 24th of February 2022. They believed what has

04:06been said on Russian state media and pumped out in the Kremlin's

04:10messaging machine that Ukraine had invaded Russia. Some of them asking us

04:15if President Zelensky was a Nazi. So you know a lot of these talking points that

04:22have been Kremlin talking points have clearly got through right down to this

04:25point near the Ukrainian border. And just a final thought from you then

04:31Catherine, Zelensky is in the United States right now, the Ukrainian

04:34President. He's due to speak to Joe Biden a bit later on this week about his

04:38so-called victory plan to end the war. How does Kursk tie into that?

04:48This is very much part of Ukraine's victory plan as President Zelensky has

04:53named it. We've spoken to officials including one of his closest advisers

04:58who said look this is one of the ways of putting military pressure on Russia to

05:02force it to end the war because they've tried sitting down at the negotiating

05:06table before and that didn't come to anything. So they hope to coerce Russia

05:11by military means expressly including the incursion into Kursk saying that by

05:15taking the war to Russian territory they can give Russia perhaps a taste of

05:21what they've been experiencing and put Putin in a difficult position in which

05:26he might be forced to make concessions. They also hope that it will move troops

05:30away from other front lines which are vulnerable at the moment especially in

05:34the east in the Donbass they want to try and prevent advances there and it's

05:39also already proved useful one of them told us in terms of prisoner exchanges.

05:44The Ukrainians when they made this incursion captured a quite a large

05:47number of Russian prisoners and some of them have already been exchanged for

05:51Ukrainian prisoners of war including some defenders of Azov style down for

05:56that last stand in Mariupol if you remember that. So there are several

06:00tactical advantages to Ukraine of this incursion of course it's coming at a

06:05heavy cost I was at a military funeral the other day of a man who was killed in

06:09this offensive and so that is proving to be a difficult battle and we don't know

06:14exactly what the casualty figures or death toll figures what the positions

06:17are because that is a tightly guarded secret but of course there will be a

06:20cost to it for Ukraine as well. Catherine Norris Trent speaking to us

06:24there about her reporting from the Kursk region of Russia thank you very much.

Category

Transcript

Be the first to comment

Recommended