Television host, YouTube blogger. Denys Khrystov had a very different life before the Russian invasion. Now a volunteer to evacuate civilians from the most dangerous places on the front line, Denys remembers all those he was unable to evacuate.
With nearly 200,000 followers on Instagram, you have to scroll through hundreds of videos and photos of destroyed Ukrainian cities to see what Denys Khrystov’s life was like before Russia’s all-out invasion.
Entertainer and host on television and YouTube, Denys Khrystov was used to entertaining the public. Today, he saves them from the most dangerous places on the front line.
Euronews met him in Brussels to talk about his work in the middle of war.
Khrystov volunteered in the first days of the large-scale invasion, in February 2022. He says he does not know how many people he rescued; instead, he calculated the distance he traveled across Ukraine in almost three years, more than a million kilometers.
Asked if he remembers how many people he did not evacuate, Mr. Khrystov replied that he remembers every single one of them. “Their faces and information about them are both stored on my phone and burned into my memory”he explains.
The places he goes are so close to the front line that often there is no cell phone coverage or internet connection. Khrystov is regularly contacted by family members, who find his phone number and call him, begging to evacuate their loved ones from the city and villages where there is almost nothing left.
He has had to return several times, because the few people who remained after the organized mass evacuations still refuse to leave what remains of their homes and homes.
These people usually do not leave their basements, which serve as bomb shelters against incessant bombardments, and are not even aware of the scorched earth around them, Khrystov says.
Why do these people stay and why don’t they leave when the situation is still relatively safe?
The story of a “stubborn grandfather”
According to Khrystov, these people have no connection with the outside world and their families, and they do not even understand the scale of danger and destruction.
When Denys and volunteers like him come to help, risking their lives, people often refuse. Volunteers therefore have to return several times to try to persuade people to evacuate. When the Russian forces close in, there are only days or even hours left to escape.
“I went there twice to evacuate an old man, who refused each time. I called him ‘my stubborn grandfather’. When I returned for the third time, he finally agreed to be evacuated”, recalls Mr. Khrystov.
The town of Kyslivka in the Kupyansk district of the Kharkiv region, where Khrystov visited three times, has since been destroyed and completely occupied by Russian troops.
Why do people refuse to evacuate? Khrystov says the old man explained it to him: “I asked him why he didn’t agree to leave the first two times. He told me he didn’t want to be a burden on his children. That’s all.”
Khrystov explains that people usually realize the reality of war when it is too late, and at first they simply do not believe “that it is possible to die on the way to the local supermarket”.
In the first days and weeks of the Russian invasion in 2022, Denys Khrystov saw many Russians claiming that the images of missile attacks and bombings against civilians were not real.
“They wrote that it was all fake, that it was staged. That’s when I decided to film and document everything I see”he explains.
This is why he believes it is essential to produce documentaries about the war as quickly as possible.
“They will provide many answers and challenge much of the content of the Russian propaganda machine,” explains Khrystov, even if his team “try to organize yourself to move on to editing and production, because it is very difficult, emotionally, to work on this subject.”
One percent war
Khrystov doesn’t have a team; everything is filmed on his phone and a GoPro camera is attached to his tactical helmet. There is also no filtering or censorship. He explains that the idea is to show the stark reality of the evacuation of civilians in times of war.
Hundreds of hours of footage are being transformed into a documentary called “One Percent of War” (One percent war).
The film tells the story of the evacuations from Avdiivka, the town in the Donetsk region that Russia occupied in mid-February this year.
“One Percent of War” shows the evacuation of a seriously injured Ukrainian soldier, a villager who was the only one left on the street, the body of a deceased Ukrainian civilian and his guard, and even animals.
Khrystov explains that when some of these people finally agreed to be evacuated, there was only one road left and few days, if not hours, to cross it.
On camera, one of the civilians evacuated from Avdiivka rescued by Khrystov told him that he wanted to go to Pokrovsk to see his family.
Six months after this report was filmed, Pokrovsk is now the most dangerous part of the front line, with Russian forces closing in on the town after months of relentless bombardment.
Out of a population of 60,000 before the war, most civilians evacuated the area. However, Ukrainian authorities say there are around 11,000 people left in Pokrovsk, which, like Avdiivka, is becoming a scorched earth. On the other hand, many civilians probably realize that there is almost no time or roads to evacuate.
This means that Khrystov and volunteers like him are once again risking their lives to seize the last chance to evacuate the remaining civilians.