The camera at the Dytiatky checkpoint that recorded the start of the invasion.

Our information center stands next to the Dytiatky checkpoint, the main entrance to the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. A few months before the invasion, a small battery-powered camera was installed on it - simply to keep an eye on the kiosk.

On February 24, 2022, Yaroslav Yemelianenko was in Kyiv watching the feed: acquaintances from the Security Service of Ukraine had asked him to watch and report what was happening. First Ukrainian vehicles drove up to the checkpoint, stood there for a few hours and left. It seemed the danger had passed.

Two hours later the russian columns came. And they did not stop.

Yaroslav, Kateryna Aslamova and a few other people from CHORNOBYL TOUR counted and described every vehicle: tanks, self-propelled guns, armored personnel carriers, fuel trucks, even quad bikes. They were carrying pontoons, boats and launches, rocket launchers. Fifty units. Seventy. One hundred fifty. Two hundred fifty. Everything was passed on right away to where it was needed. And on TV that day they were saying: don't worry, russia will not get through. On the screen, though, the columns had no end, and it was impossible to imagine how they could be stopped.

When the russian invaders entered, they switched off and smashed the cameras at the state checkpoint. Ours, with battery power for several days, kept working.

Its end was senseless. A resident of a nearby village took a cart and went with his son to the information center to take our freezer. The russians noticed the movement, opened fire and blew up the information center. The looter was killed, and the feed went dead. By then another channel was already working - people in the occupied villages.

When the enemy was driven out, the women who worked at our information centers could not hold back their tears. They had kept the places spotless and arranged everything as if at home, and their children dreamed of working there. "If even tourist information centers are fighting here, we will definitely not give up," Yaroslav wrote at the time.

The columns never reached Kyiv. They were stopped by ordinary people who rose up to resist, and later, together with the Defense Forces and the security services, drove the enemy out of the Zone. The information operation with the trenches in the Red Forest also played its part.

Footage from our camera was published by the Associated Press and the Washington Post.