THE STORY – Anastasia Trofimova, a Russian-Canadian filmmaker, gains unprecedented access to follow a Russian Army battalion in Ukraine. Without any official clearance or permits, she earns the trust of foot soldiers and embeds herself over the span of a year with one battalion as it makes its way across Eastern Ukraine. What she discovers is far from the propaganda and labels pushed by the East or the West: an army in disarray, soldiers disillusioned and often struggling to understand what they are fighting for.
THE CAST – N/A
THE TEAM – Anastasia Trofimova (Director/Writer) & Roland Schlimme (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 129 Minutes
A chance encounter with a man dressed as Father Christmas leads Russian-Canadian filmmaker Anastasia Trofimova on a seven-month adventure with a Russian army battalion in Eastern Ukraine. Here, she is adopted by the unit and becomes privy to their thoughts, fears, and confessions. She is given a uniform to wear and is allowed to bear witness to the disastrous progress of the war for the Russians and the human cost, both physically and psychologically.
Ilya – the Santa Claus who gives Trofimova her in – is the most politically committed soldier she will meet. He’s a Ukrainian separatist who fights on the side of the Russians. The other men of the battalion are a disparate bunch. Some are shockingly young and naive, and some have seen better days. One is a drug addict in his fifties; another believes everyone is fighting for money, even though they haven’t been paid, while a young man claims to be fighting Nazis. They all express bafflement at the behavior of the Ukrainians whose belligerence they put down to the interference of the West and the US in particular.
Trofimova occasionally challenges their views with a question about the Russian invasion, but no one – including Trofimova – wants to get into politics. The soldiers want to drink when they can, smoke endless cigarettes, avoid danger, and do what they perceive as their duty. For her part, Trofimova states her mission is to find out who the true Russians are beyond the stereotypes of the idealized heroes of the Russian media and the mindless killing machines of the media from the West. She is tolerated by the higher-ups in the military, but as the battalion moves towards the frontline, word comes down that she might be sent back to Russia, so she keeps her head down.
Obviously, the difficulty in watching the film is allowing one’s political prejudices to get in the way. Still, it is also a legitimate question to pose as to how much the film is whitewashing the Russian military. Trofimova refers to the soldiers as “the guys” throughout and films them at their most personal. A romance blooms between a medic and her comrade, and Trofimova captures his proposal on camera. The soldiers are well-meaning, and Trofimova films mainly non-belligerent activities: the medics retrieving corpses and the wounded, the supply drivers delivering goods to the cut-off villages in no man’s land where a Babushka rains blessings on them. When they do something vaguely violent, they are always the victims of the Ukranians or their own ineptness: an early injury is caused when a grenade from their own drones falls on one of the men. As for the atrocities that Russian soldiers have been accused of, a young soldier can’t believe such a thing would be possible. “Why would someone do something like that?”
The problem with accepting so much at face value, however, is that the atrocities aren’t just accusations; they are well-documented events. And giving herself the apolitical task of humanizing the ordinary soldier, Trofimova seems unaware that being apolitical isn’t an option in a time of war. The film itself neither challenges its own premise nor gives convincing support for it. The humanizing scenes feel both staged and cliched.
As the film approaches the frontlines in Bakhmut, the soldiers start to encounter more violence, and their fear goes up proportionally. But here, Trofimova understandably stops short – and here, no criticism is implied. The soldiers will fight out of the frame except for the drones, the footage of which will then be uploaded to morbid Telegram channels dedicated to war porn. It is obvious that the war will have many consequences. In Italy, the conditions in the First World War led to a sense of camaraderie that spurned the ruling elites in favor of the brotherhood formed in the trenches. It was called “Trenchocracy.” These ex-soldiers who felt they had fought for nothing took the lesson that the important values were those of masculine solidarity and discipline, spurning bourgeois values of democracy and freedom. It would later inspire a political movement called fascism. Trofimova’s film depicts the new seeds of a similar growth.
