Arrangements

This monday after recovering from our antics over the weekend, waiting desperately for another chance to get in contact with the army, our first goal was to ring the public relations officer we had worked so hard on getting a meeting with. However all morning we rang and all morning his phone was switched off, this was a big a big blow as we were heavily counting on them for safer passage through some of the dangerous areas and information regarding on where we can and cannot film.

Although we were obviously concerned about our best contact so far not being contactable we decided to continue and try and follow all other leads that we had. We also discovered that the previous night Sjedove (where we had visited the refugee camp) had been mortared and a checkpoint destroyed from an attack by sea and figured that the army were possibly being especially cautious at this point.

Our translator Bogdan had been helping us with some of the footage we acquired and also trying to get in contact with any other possible links he had. He managed to setup a meeting with a local film maker and head of the media department in one of the local universities, we met her and another older director in a cafe close to where we were saying and discussed (with the help of Bogdan) some possible options, they were both really helpful in trying to assist us and were keen we meet some of their students and see the other side of Mariupol and the Ukraine. They wanted us to also see the side not related to the fighting and the conflict which was a fair point due to the focus of the media on the conflict at the moment. However being in Kiev and Mariupol where currently there has not been any fighting for a while I found it interesting how most normal people seemed to just get on with their lives as I suppose people do all over the world in similar situations.

They managed to set us up with a journalist that evening who said he would be able to drive us to Donetsk on the weekend. Although we wanted to leave much sooner we were happy to at least have some sort of lead and were looking forward to discussing with him how dangerous it may possibly be, costs etc.

After meeting him we unfortunately discovered although he was very keen to show us the damage that was done in Mariupol a few months before he would only really be available on weekends and would probably not be much help to us at this point. He was currently working in security and would probably be more of a hindrance, so after having a few beers with him and some other contacts we decided to meet a driver contact the following evening and arrange our own passage to Slaviansk.

The same night we invited Paul, an ex British serviceman living in Mariupol. He had been deported from Russia for spying and had a lot of good information on the border situation here in the east. Along with a few local journalists, Bogdan and Bohdan we had quite an interesting night discussing the best way too get to Slaviansk. Later on our potential driver joined us. He seemed really friendly and we arranged payment and the route we would take with him.

So finally we are ready to go. We leave for Slaviansk in an hour, hopefully it will be a smooth journey and we can get some good footage and interesting stories. We will try to keep the blog updated but we do not know the internet or power situation so may have to give an overview when we get back.