00:00We're heading out into the open sea from Odessa, Ukraine's last major port not occupied by Russia.
00:06We can't show you the city or the port behind us. Odessa is already under near daily Russian attack.
00:12The Ukrainian military worries that any detail shown here could help direct those Russian strikes.
00:17This is currently one of the most dangerous stretches of water in the world and it's not just
00:22for the find. It is also because of down missiles, down drones, and trying to find those drones and
00:29destroy them before they do any damage to civilian ships before the beaches is the task of these
00:35Ukrainian soldiers here today. The team has just received the coordinates of an unidentified
00:42object sighted on the sea floor. They're sending a drone rather than a diver to investigate.
00:47Seafox is ready to launch. And we're ready as well.
00:58It looks like a piece of missile fuselage. You can see it's already covered with shells. I can tell it's
01:04part of a missile but we'll only be able to tell if it's still dangerous, whether there's still
01:09explosives in here, once we get the footage from the other camera.
01:12Today's catch doesn't need to be destroyed immediately. Experts back on land will review
01:20the footage and decide what to do.
01:22If you spend a few days in Odessa, you'll notice just how many air alerts we have here,
01:30how much there is flying over the city. There's so much down there. The Black Sea is the most heavily
01:36mine see in the world right now. Sometimes though, a mine or a downed missile has to be destroyed in a
01:43hurry. If it's a threat to a shipping lane, divers go down to perform a controlled detonation. The crew
01:50tell us they sometimes have to sacrifice a drone to carry out the kamikaze mission. But technology has
01:56yet to replace humans completely. Some missions still require divers and their know-how in spite of the risks.
02:02The danger for these divers isn't just from the mines and the missiles underwater.
02:07Right now the divers are having to wait because there is essentially a traffic jam out at sea.
02:11Many of the foreign ships heading for the port of Odessa are simply choosing to ignore the
02:15warnings that demining is going on in this part of the sea and are coming too close for the divers to
02:20do their job. This time it's a false alarm. Nothing dangerous, just scrap metal. Crew have to respond to
02:28any credible report of an unidentified object. Often enough, that ends up being a fridge or other
02:33rubbish brought in by the currents. And when they do find explosives, it's not just this war's mines
02:38they're clearing up. If we're still finding mines from World War II, and sometimes even from World War I,
02:47that tells you how many years of work we have ahead of us. If the war were to end tomorrow, the crew tell us,
02:57they'd likely still have another eight to ten years work ahead of them to clear the seas off Odessa.
03:01With no end to the war in sight, these crews and their work are here to stay.
