As Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine wages on, Ukrainian civilians have been increasingly caught in the crossfire. One civilian, in particular, had a close call caught on a video as a Russian Grad multiple-launch rocket system (MLRS) fired a barrage right on the intersection he was driving through.
Video shared on Friday afternoon showed a civilian driver waiting at a stoplight near the city of Kharkiv before the thunderous sound of a rocket barrage began to ring out all around him. Hearing the first explosions, the driver hit the gas and began speeding through the light as rockets began to fall in the intersection.
All around the driver, large puffs of dust told the driver where the latest rocket had landed and exploded into fragments.
The driver sped into the intersection just long enough to pull a u-turn, while still avoiding the rockets, and then he sped away in the other direction with rockets still falling within a few yards of him. As the driver got clear, he could be heard on the video letting out a sigh of relief.
While some social media viewers noted the date on the dashcam read that it had occurred in 2021, one open-source intelligence (OSINT) analyst Oliver Alexander said, “There are 2 scenarios: 1. Guy set dashcam date wrong 2. Exactly to the day 1 year ago MLRS was striking Ukraine, even though the last reported MLRS launches in Donbass were 2018 before this escalation.”
Alexander also geolocated the site of the attack, matching it to an intersection about 9 miles north of the Kharkiv city center.
Civilians have repeatedly been caught in the middle of the fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces over the first three days of the Russian invasion.
On Thursday, what appears to have been an armored Russian 9K35 Strela-10 mobile surface-to-air missile launcher vehicle was caught on multiple videos swerving in traffic on the roadways around Kyiv, to run over a civilian car fleeing the city.
The Russian armored vehicle flattened the civilian car, but the driver miraculously survived.
Video taken after the incident showed Ukrainian civilians helping to free the driver, an elderly man, from his crushed vehicle.
Another Ukrainian civilian was seen standing on a roadway near the city of Kherson on Thursday, attempting to block an entire convoy of Russian Tigr infantry mobility vehicles from getting through. Video of the incident showed the man running in front of one Russian vehicle after another, delaying each for a matter of seconds before they quickly swerved around him.
