Ukraine's Special Forces Put On a Show for Eurovision

A group of armed soldiers move quietly through a tunnel in the Kyiv metro station. They are making their way to the neighbouring station, ‘Ploscha Lva Tolstoho’, where passengers have been taken hostage in a train car. The soldiers arrive, they break the glass and step into the car to release the hostages. They are all alive and unharmed. However, none of this is real.

In the run up to the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest hosted by the Ukrainian capital, the Kyiv police force are preparing themselves for just about anything. With thousands of Eurovision fans from 43 different countries set to descend on the city in just a few weeks, safety has been a top priority. Dog-handlers, patrol officers and the ‘KORD’ special forces have been training for how to deal with emergency situations in the Kyiv metro.

The first scenario was a hostage situation, in which the special forces had to break into one of the carriages and rescue the victims. In the second, Kyiv police tested out a robot designed to neutralise any suspicious items.

In a statement following the training exercise, the head of the Kyiv police told the press that the police are ready for the event.

Three dozen cameras observed the process and they all captured the same image. However, Hromadske’s gonzo-documentalist Bohdan Kutyepov shows the media professionals and the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs’ press service that they are not just observers, but participants in this training.