Ukrainian beekeeper refuses to abandon hives as Russian troops advance
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00:00We are near Mihnograd, just a few kilometers away from the front line.
00:04This is Sasha. He's a former resident and a beekeeper here,
00:08and in the middle of harvesting his honey. A hard task given the war raging nearby.
00:20The goal is to extract the honey as quickly as possible,
00:23prepare the bees to take them to safety, probably to the Dnipro region,
00:27because leaving them here makes no sense. They would not survive.
00:34A few months ago, Sasha almost died in the bombing of his house.
00:38Evacuated to the west of the country,
00:40he returned to Mihnograd so as not to abandon his bees and his dozens of hives.
00:45He knows that he's risking his own life, and that every day is a race against time.
00:51The front line is not far at all. You can hear everything that is happening there.
00:56It is too dangerous to stay here for the night.
01:01The calm of the moment is deceptive. Every day, Sasha and his friend Andrey
01:06make the round trip from Pavlograd, about 50 kilometers away.
01:11A throwback to the years spent here in complete peace,
01:15when the Russian bombs were still far away.
01:21Everything was perfect here. We did not have a single piece of paper lying around.
01:27It was a great time. We got up early in the morning, we saw the sunrise,
01:31the sunset, its path during the day, and how the bees started to work.
01:42Sasha knows that this harvest will probably be his last in Mihnograd.
01:48Due to the advance of the Russian troops and the destruction that accompanies them,
01:52the beekeeper knows that every moment here will soon belong only to memories.