‘High time to leave’: Civilians flee Ukraine’s Pokrovsk as Russia advances

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00:00Oleksandr has finally persuaded his mother to evacuate.

00:04I've got two sons. One wanted me to leave, the other didn't.

00:19Oleksandr himself is not leaving, yet.

00:22My job is here, my home. There's still some kind of life here.

00:26Shops are open, but we'll see how things develop.

00:29Either they'll come to me or I'll come back to them. We're not going to separate.

00:34Let's go.

00:35Reluctant at first, residents of Bukrovsk are now leaving in their hundreds every day.

00:40We took a long time to make up our minds.

00:43What's the point of waiting if you know you're going to have to leave?

00:46It's high time, absolutely.

00:50I've been working on these evacuation trains for more than six months,

00:54and today we've really got a lot of carriages.

00:57So anyone can just show up and we'll take them to a safer place to live.

01:11Meanwhile, Ukraine's incursion into Russia's Kursk region continues to dominate the news,

01:16and life in Bukrovsk appears to go on.

01:19I've got a job to do, so I'll be one of the last to leave.

01:23Everyone here knows that the Russian army is just 10 kilometers away now,

01:27and Ukrainian soldiers predict a long, hard fight for control of this crucial hub.

01:32I'm leaving tomorrow or the day after. It's tough.

01:37It's a hard decision to make, but my kid is 17. We've got to get out of here.

01:43Bukrovsk has already been targeted by Russian strikes many times in the course of this war,

01:48but now the city is fearing an onslaught of a whole different level of intensity,

01:53like the ones that razed cities like Mariupol or Bakhmut almost to the ground.

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