Our city Kherson was invaded - we stayed and filmed

"I saw a robot today," my five-year-old daughter Ksusha whispered to me as I filmed her underneath the table, Qazet.az presents.

"It was flying… it wanted to kill me."

It wasn't clear what - if anything - Ksusha had seen that day to evoke the disturbing image. But evidently she was unsettled. 

Nothing had been the same since Russian soldiers first marched past our window in the late afternoon of 1 March, and I began filming our lives for a BBC Eye documentary. My day job had been as a local reporter. Never did I think I would be filming an invasion of my home city - the only Ukrainian regional capital to have been captured.

How we shielded Ksusha from the brutality of Russia's invasion, and we ourselves remained sane, became central to our lives, as my wife Lidia and I grappled with our new reality.