Vladyslav Yesypenko, freelance correspondent for Radio Liberty and Shelter, shared a video of his drive in a damaged car along the Kharkiv — Dnipro highway, showing the scale of destruction to civilian infrastructure and petrol stations.
He posted the video on Facebook, setting it to “From Souvenirs to Souvenirs” by Greek artist Demis Roussos. In comments to IMI journalist Valentyna Troyan, Vladyslav Yesypenko spoke about the difficult the trip and shared his thoughts and feelings along the route.
The footage shows destroyed and burned-out sites along both sides of the road, including petrol stations. Colleagues commenting on the video noted that Vladyslav looks like a character out of a war film.
“The urge to film this came when I was headed from Dnipro to Kharkiv. I ended up having to turn back to Dnipro to refuel the car, because a serviceman friend of mine, who was accompanying me, warned me that almost every petrol station along this route had been destroyed. Of course, I never imagined I’d be making the return trip in a damaged car. As I was driving, I was just glad to be alive. I was thinking about my family and my daughter Stefania. About whether they should maybe wait out this difficult period abroad, since there’s danger ahead and a hard winter coming. I think the enemy will be targeting not just [power] substations, but railway bridges too, including those in Kyiv, and road bridges over the Dnipro river, to cause total collapse. I don’t consider myself a hero. I just wanted to show that all of us are still carrying on the fight,” Yesypenko said.
The journalist added that he had had to turn back to Dnipro to refuel the car. In the comments under the video, he also noted that his car had been seriously damaged in an air strike earlier. In particular, the windows had been blasted out, the brake lines and various wires had been severed, and the fuel tank and shock absorber struts had been punctured.
As reported earlier, Vladyslav Yesypenko was inside a ten-storey building in Kharkiv’s Saltivka district as Russian forces struck it early on 9 August. He was in a seventh floor apartment at the moment of the attack. The journalist’s car was damaged in the strike.