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00:00And Catherine Norris Trent is with me now. Catherine, take us a little bit
00:04behind the scenes of your reporting then. How did you find access and filming
00:09during your embed with the Ukrainian army?
00:14Hello there Nadia. We were taken in as you saw by the Ukrainian army as part of
00:20a small group of journalists, impossible to access by oneself of course and
00:26impossible for us to access via the Russian side where we haven't been
00:31given visas for quite some time. But the access, we were allowed to film whatever
00:36we wanted apart from military vehicles. The Ukrainian army was very anxious not
00:41to give away any of its locations because of course they are being
00:44targeted daily by Russian attacks in this counter offensive. Vladimir Putin
00:51has said that he wants to take back the whole of the Kursk region. It's being
00:56reported by October so it's a pretty intensive fight. You could hear some of
01:00the artillery there. There was even more off-camera. So we were allowed to speak
01:05to whichever civilians we wanted to including ones there you saw in our
01:09report who definitely hadn't yet been convinced by Ukraine's argument and we
01:15were not given restrictions on what we were allowed to broadcast from them. So
01:19in terms of the restrictions they were mainly only on the security side.
01:25Off-camera soldiers telling us look the battle is intense, it's dynamic, that was
01:30the word one of them used, so fast-moving. The situation is changing hands. We had
01:35been due to go to another location but at the last minute we couldn't go there
01:38because there were just too many attacks and one soldier told us that in the 24
01:43hours preceding our visit there'd been 80 attack drones or missiles including
01:48guide bombs fired by Russia onto what is part of its own territory inside the
01:54Kursk region. And Catherine I know that there were parts of this story that you
01:59weren't able to show us in the film itself. Tell us a bit about what we
02:02actually didn't see. I mean there were so many things we got in our very quick
02:09visit there but the civilians who are left behind are often people who are
02:13sick or elderly and often they've been cut off from their families elsewhere in
02:17the Kursk region in what is still controlled by the Russian government. So
02:22they're desperate to evacuate and they're asking to evacuate. The Ukrainian
02:26soldiers at this point are saying well you know Russia's not allowing us to and
02:30they've called for the UN and the Red Cross to have access to Kursk to assess
02:33the humanitarian needs but they want access to telephones which they say they
02:37don't have they want to be able to speak to family members. Ukraine says it's
02:42giving them food, some humanitarian aid and water trucks now so they're getting
02:48the basics of life but life for them is very difficult day to day. Of course we
02:53couldn't spend much time there with them experiencing as much as that because
02:57our trip reporting there was lasted for a few hours for security
03:02reasons. And as you said a bit earlier civilians were relatively free to talk
03:07to you, the Ukrainian army were happy for you to do that but were people in general
03:11willing to talk to you? Were they interested in speaking to foreign media?
03:19A few people weren't but surprisingly we found that most people wanted to engage
03:25with us. Some of them perhaps hadn't had much contact with the outside world, some
03:29of them thought that by speaking out maybe they could get help to evacuate as
03:33well. Some of them wanted to express their anger and you saw that pouring out
03:38on the streets now and you saw the very different vision they have of the world.
03:43Some Russians we spoke to there in the Ukrainian controlled part of Kursk for
03:51now, they said that they thought the war had started on the 6th of August, that's
03:56when Ukraine's lightning incursion into Kursk began. They didn't believe that it
04:01had started some of them on the 24th of February 2022. They believed what has
04:06been said on Russian state media and pumped out in the Kremlin's
04:10messaging machine that Ukraine had invaded Russia. Some of them asking us
04:15if President Zelensky was a Nazi. So you know a lot of these talking points that
04:22have been Kremlin talking points have clearly got through right down to this
04:25point near the Ukrainian border. And just a final thought from you then
04:31Catherine, Zelensky is in the United States right now, the Ukrainian
04:34President. He's due to speak to Joe Biden a bit later on this week about his
04:38so-called victory plan to end the war. How does Kursk tie into that?
04:48This is very much part of Ukraine's victory plan as President Zelensky has
04:53named it. We've spoken to officials including one of his closest advisers
04:58who said look this is one of the ways of putting military pressure on Russia to
05:02force it to end the war because they've tried sitting down at the negotiating
05:06table before and that didn't come to anything. So they hope to coerce Russia
05:11by military means expressly including the incursion into Kursk saying that by
05:15taking the war to Russian territory they can give Russia perhaps a taste of
05:21what they've been experiencing and put Putin in a difficult position in which
05:26he might be forced to make concessions. They also hope that it will move troops
05:30away from other front lines which are vulnerable at the moment especially in
05:34the east in the Donbass they want to try and prevent advances there and it's
05:39also already proved useful one of them told us in terms of prisoner exchanges.
05:44The Ukrainians when they made this incursion captured a quite a large
05:47number of Russian prisoners and some of them have already been exchanged for
05:51Ukrainian prisoners of war including some defenders of Azov style down for
05:56that last stand in Mariupol if you remember that. So there are several
06:00tactical advantages to Ukraine of this incursion of course it's coming at a
06:05heavy cost I was at a military funeral the other day of a man who was killed in
06:09this offensive and so that is proving to be a difficult battle and we don't know
06:14exactly what the casualty figures or death toll figures what the positions
06:17are because that is a tightly guarded secret but of course there will be a
06:20cost to it for Ukraine as well. Catherine Norris Trent speaking to us
06:24there about her reporting from the Kursk region of Russia thank you very much.