Two years ago, the Ukrainian photojournalist and film-maker Mstyslav Chernov stunned us with his eyewitness documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, about Russia’s brutal assault on the southern Ukrainian port city. His new film is if anything more visceral, with waking-nightmare images captured in pin-sharp 4K digital clarity. It is a moment-by-moment account of his experience embedded with Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade in 2023 (one of them appears to be a Brit) during Zelenskyy’s highly anticipated counteroffensive, making a gruelling journey along what amounts to a two-kilometre corridor of “forest”.
In fact, it is scrubland offering no real cover – but it is free of Russian mines, unlike the areas of farmland either side. The forces brutally fight every metre of the way, heading for the symbolic liberation of the largely ruined village of Andriivka in north-eastern Ukraine. They are carrying a precious Ukrainian flag, and it is their mission to fix this to any broken bit of wall they can find, to proclaim their national spirit is not dead. They are in a wasteland, as one says: “It’s like landing on a planet where everyone is trying to kill you. But it’s the middle of Europe.”
Chernov is armed only with a camera, to the astonishment of many soldiers he encounters, and the film was constructed by editing his footage together with that of solders’ helmet cameras and drone material. Chernov shows us how drones are now utterly ubiquitous in war, delivering both the pictures and the assaults. That is the ultra-modern, even postmodern aspect of this film, but it coexists with an eerie resemblance to the eastern front of the first world war. Chernov, in one of his murmuringly subdued voiceovers, comments: “The smell of death, explosives and freshly cut trees.”
The wrecked landscape does indeed look like 1916, and Chernov does not scruple to show us real dead bodies (but spares us the ultimate horror of the corpses’ faces). When the intertitles flash up the grim advances – 1,000 meters to go, 300 metres to go – it is like the cricket-style scoreboard for the Battle of the Somme in Richard Attenborough’s film of Oh! What a Lovely War: “Ground gained: nil.”
The most heart-wrenching moments come when Chernov interviews soldiers in a quiet moment, their twentysomething faces alive with intelligence – and in a sombre voiceover tells us how they were killed four or five months later. It is a (repeated) flourish that might be considered on the verge of bad taste, but Chernov manages it with such unflinching conviction. Since the events of this film, Russia has counter-counterattacked and retaken Andriivka; though now we hear Trump has soured on Putin. A Ukrainian soldier surveys the wreck of Andriivka and says: “Everything will grow back.”
• 2000 Meters to Andriivka is in UK and Irish cinemas from 1 August.
