Live from the Ukrainian Border

I hear the bombs every 30-40 seconds and it's just, it's coming closer and I don't know what to do. I don't have a car. I don't know how to leave and I will just... This kind of... I hear all the time and it's coming closer. Hi guys, welcome back to the channel. I'm here with Anna and, well, you can see Anna, right? I can't see the camera. This is a really important video I wanted to make and it's a video that I don't really want. I don't want to make this video but it's important that I do make this video so that you guys see what's happening here on the border. Right now Anna and I are on the Polish and Ukrainian border, one of the only vehicles driving over in this area. As we look out this way, these mountains and everything that you see, this is all Ukraine. The border crossing is technically right there, the birds, everything over the lake. And so the reason that we come out here is it's really important for everybody to see what's happening to the refugees as they reach the border and what happens when they get spread out. Anna would agree with me that it's a really sensitive video to make because a lot of the people that are coming across, just like Anna herself when she came, that you go three days, four days without proper sleep and this kind of thing and so the last thing you want is when you cross the border and you finally feel that safety, the last thing you want is somebody recording this tragic chapter of your life because these are people that are coming with literally nothing. I mean their entire life is in a plastic bag so it's going to be... I want to show you guys what it's like but it really straddles the line of what's possible to film because fundamentally I think it's just very disrespectful to go out there and to film people in this moment of their life. So I'll try to show you from afar kind of what it's like. So over the last few days we've been going all over across the border, checking out the different spots of not only when the refugees enter the border region, the processing that happens because now they're technically in European Union, but then also how they get split out into the points of help and also then basically the fork in the road as to where their entire life goes from here because it's all completely unknown for them. Yesterday, even just yesterday as we were driving around in this kind of area, you come driving up and you see Blackhawk helicopters going across, scanning the entire border periphery. Military trucks. Yeah, military trucks and things like this. And so, and almost every vehicle is Ukrainian, either it's people coming out or it's trucks that are bringing humanitarian aid and all this kind of stuff. And so it's borderline scary when you show up at a place like this and when you're driving up on the road, you know what you're driving into, into this area. And when you see a helicopter like this, what used to be in your mind is seeing a helicopter and thinking like, oh, you know, helicopters are cool and all this kind of stuff. They're really amazing pieces of machinery. But unfortunately, we've only seen now the worst that this machinery can deliver. And that's instinctively what you think when you see these helicopters is that it's going to start firing on you or bombs are going to be dropping from it. And so the entire time in this area, your heart is always racing because you never know what's going to happen. So we'll hop back in the car and we're going to keep going and check out some of the some of the crossings and then also the processing centers. Anything you'd like to add? Yeah, like I agree with everything what you said, totally, that we cannot film people, but we'll try to show everything we can just for you to understand what is really happening in the world right now. Yeah. So, okay, let's go. Okay, so now we've... I need my hat. One second. Now we've reached over on the proper, the border. We're going to go up here to the crossing in just a minute. But I was just driving by and I saw the, this is one of the small village crossings. You can still get the old, the checkbox here, because this is actually literally the separation between European Union. You see this... European Union and then Ukraine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's actually really fascinating. Over there, we have the Ukrainian flag and this is what we're going to be going to, the refugee settlements that are up there. And I can just walk right there. I can walk right around it. I can walk through it. You see the Ukrainian colored flag and then, of course, the Polish one. The Polish one, yeah. The checkpoint. Very quiet. Very relaxed. Okay, but the reason we're here is we're going back up to the refugee center. This is the third one today or something like that. Second one? I can't remember. It's third or fourth. I don't even remember. Fourth, I think. Yeah, so the idea in my mind is to show you how this all operates is to show you first a checkpoint to see where the refugees are coming across and then how the roads fork and where they go up from here. This is actually the place we're going. It's actually the border crossing which I crossed. Okay, so now this border crossing… Here, Anna, come on over. This is actually the border crossing that Anna went through. And so, Anna, this is a good moment for her to explain kind of what her experience was like coming across the border. Yeah, so first of all, it took a lot of days for me to come here and there were a lot of people crossing. We were standing there for all night just to cross the Ukrainian border. And we were, even though we felt safe and happy to finally cross the border, but at the same time, we were going to nowhere. We didn't know what will be for us the next moment, right? But we're still very happy to be here and it's just… How do you feel to come back to this place? I feel a bit weird. I feel weird because, not because I'm on the border, like over here, but just because I know that Ukraine is just right next to me, right? And even though I can't go there, but at the same time, I can't, right? Because I don't want to face any problems. And it is so sad that, you know, this is your own country, but you cannot go back over there for various reasons. I cannot go back to my hometown, so it makes me feel sad. But at the same time, I feel safe here and I'm happy about it. Okay, so we're going to keep going into some of the receiving centers. I'll show you just a little bit of that and then we'll wrap up the video there. So let's hop back in the car. We'll keep going. You can do that. No, it's okay. Okay, so we're just leaving the refugee center over here as well. And this is the one over by Rzeszów and the entrance kind of between here and Lviv. And this one is the biggest one by far. As you can see, it's just like a… It's like a huge, massive, yeah. It's like a warehouse. Warehouse, yeah. And so we're just going around inside to go see if we can… What kind of help is needed there. And I'd say, how many people are there? 800 at least? Yeah, something like that. And some new buses coming in? Yeah, yeah, yeah. People are living there for many days because they have no place to go, no place to stay. So they provide them everything and they upgraded a lot of stuff though. So it seems to be getting a lot better and now a lot more services like medical services now on place. On campus. Also representatives from the UK, from Finland to help arrange the paperwork and the visas to get going. So that's the kind of help that is needed. Someone like me would be helpful in helping to plan travel. Helping people decide which buses, which train routes and which area of Europe they would fit best in. Anyway, and so of course we have like 3,000 or so people here. I was downplaying it earlier. Now that I think about it, it's actually a good 3,000 at least. And what happens from here is now it's arranged that buses or trains or different routes to basically fan out, spread out over Europe or internationally. And Anna was saying, you know, even when she was in this experience going through it, that the bus will pull up and someone will come in and shout Berlin, Berlin, Italy and this kind of stuff. And everybody comes, picks up their stuff, grabs their bag and helps on the bus. And people just randomly choose any country. They still don't know where to go. But someone just goes. They choose the nearest bus which is coming. And they go inside and they just go straight to nowhere. That's probably the most important thing to convey is that still even once you get across the border and you kind of figure out, OK, I'm past Ukraine, it's a really big question mark. And the question marks never stop. Every fork in the road that you choose, it leads to two more questions down the road. You don't know where you're going to stay. Because you don't get this kind of information. You just go into the place and then there are some volunteers who tell you you can stay in this house for that long, you can stay in that house for that long. And people try to get their life back, you know, and try to find a work to feed their family. Because they understand it's not going to last that long, right? So they have to somehow start a new life, like a new page, a new book. I think that's where we'll wrap it up. Like I said, we can go into a lot of details. But it's really important that you guys see this and understand what's going on for the people here. This thing will stop in foreign countries.