Civilians in Ukraine's Pokrovsk 'bearing the brunt of war with Russia'

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00:00me now is our correspondent Emmanuelle Chaz who lives now in Kyiv. She's over with us here in

00:04Paris at the moment. She's with me here on set. Emmanuelle, I know you've been to Port-au-Rouge

00:08yourself on those streets where Catherine was filming over the weekend. Many people now leaving

00:14the area. Absolutely, I was there several times over the course of the summer and you could really

00:19feel a change of atmosphere as opposed to what it was just a few months ago. People at the beginning

00:24of the summer were still wondering whether or not they would have to leave and then in front of

00:29Russian advances they decided to pack and to leave. You have to keep in mind that those people

00:36just leave everything behind. They leave their home, they leave also sometimes family members

00:41who don't want to go or cannot go. I'm thinking about elderly people, about people with disabilities.

00:46We've talked about it quite often and also something that is quite sad when you go to

00:52Pokrovsk is that civilians, when they see foreign journalists, they're actually eager to talk

00:58more often than not because they think that if people abroad are seeing their plight something

01:03will change. What we've seen those past few weeks is that changes are only for the worst, that

01:08people only have to leave to save their lives and the city is more and more

01:15targeted by Russian bombs. So the civilians in Pokrovsk are

01:21bearing the brunt of this war as is the case for two years and a half. You spent most of your

01:26time overseas in Kiev. It's still very difficult there isn't it? Air defence is still a major

01:31problem just for one example. Absolutely. I mean Kiev is far from the front line. It's mostly okay

01:37to live there. You have a normal life 90% of the time and then comes night and you have air raid

01:42alerts, you have the sound of drones, you have the sound of air defence, you have explosions with

01:47windows shaking and residential buildings being hit not necessarily by drones or missiles but

01:53by the debris that are falling. So nowhere is really safe in Ukraine, even cities that do

01:59feel safe. I'm thinking about Kiev, I'm also thinking about Lviv in the western part of the

02:03country. It was recently hit by a missile and this missile just crushed completely a residential

02:10building. It killed an entire family and those are daily occurrences. Last night it was Zaporizhia,

02:16a residential building, 13 people wounded and this summer has been particularly bloody for

02:22civilians. Also a few weeks ago if you remember there was that strike against Poltava Institute

02:28of Communication. It was a military academy, almost 60 people died, over 300 people injured.

02:36I don't know if we can imagine just the scene of horror that this was in the aftermath of the

02:43strike and those occurrences, those bombings, they are a daily occurrence in Ukraine and they affect

02:50the civilian population. Most of the targets are not military, most of the targets are just

02:58on civilians and that's the hardest for the population to go through.

03:03Hearing all of that, what is the sentiment like now? We're heading into the winter,

03:07obviously there are some advances, notably that incursion in Kursk, but at the same time the

03:12Russian forces do seem to be encroaching further and further as we saw in Catherine's report. How

03:17are people feeling? Well, it's complicated. For example, the Kursk incursion, it was kind of a

03:23moral boost for a lot of people. They were finally seeing the Ukrainian army achieving something

03:28significantly successful. I mean the fact that the Ukrainian army had enough force, enough power,

03:35manpower, equipment to do that incursion, of course people were surprised but they also mostly

03:40welcomed this incursion. But there's also a lot of interrogations, what is happening on the eastern

03:45front. We see that the Ukrainian forces are still under intense pressure, not just in Pokrovsk but

03:51also in Toretsk, also in Chasiv Yar, where it's very, very difficult and the situation is very

03:57complicated for the army there. Plus there's been the bombing on all the energy facilities

04:05in Ukraine, more than 90% of the thermal power plants

04:08destroyed, so people are bracing themselves for a very, very difficult winter.

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