Holed up in a home belonging to an elderly woman in occupied Eastern Ukraine, a soldier named Ilya has a frank conversation with his superior officer.
“I came here for patriotism,” he says.
“Do you see it here?” his superior asks.
Taking a beat, Ilya replies, “Not anymore, unfortunately.”
It’s a conversation that happens early in Anastasia Trofimova’s controversial documentary “Russians at War,” which had its public screenings at the Toronto International Film Festival cancelled last week amid heavy protest, denouncements by members of Parliament and the federal cabinet, the loss of broadcast partner TVO, and alleged threats to public safety. It’s also emblematic of the film’s tone, in which the morass of the war has produced in its invading forces a disillusionment close to nihilism. (In a recent reversal, the film will now screen Sept. 17 at 2 and 6:30 p.m. at the TIFF Lightbox.)
The film opens with Trofimova, a Russian-Canadian filmmaker, meeting Ilya on a train. Hailing from Ukraine, he volunteered to fight on the Russian side. Joining him on return to his battalion, Trofimova is granted permission by the commanders there to film a documentary about the reality of life for Russians on the front, without the knowledge or approval of the state.
What she finds there are soldiers — almost all of them originally volunteers, most of them stuck there months past their contracts and likely to be drafted either way — stuck in a quagmire of their leaders’ making. Most enlisted with some sense of the patriotism and righteousness Ilya once felt. One young soldier says he’s there to fight Nazism, which has been Vladimir Putin’s spurious justification for Russia’s February 2022 invasion. Most now feel their fight is a meaningless one, that they have become little more than cannon fodder.
“We got into a fight with Ukraine, but I don’t feel I’m right,” says another soldier at one point, reflecting on his position in the conflict. The views and motivations of the soldiers are all over the place.
In a spirited debate among them, one claims that they’re all just there for the money, but others push back, including a middle-aged soldier who says he signed up to help bring the war to a swift end so that it won’t still be raging when his teenage children are of draft age. Another explains that the war was his escape from drug addiction.
“Russians at War” is, despite the controversy surrounding it, an excellent and bracing documentary. Its observational honesty is its great feat, sharing the harrowing experiences of soldiers easily demonized in the West and glossed over by state media at home.
Rifling through a Russian newspaper, a soldier comments, “What’s written here is basically propaganda,” adding that he volunteered in part because of the false rah-rah coverage he’d seen on TV. What “Russians at War” does is humanize “the enemy,” reminding the viewer, however difficult it may be to accept, that these soldiers are people, too; that they have also been lied to and abused by the machinations of self-interested leaders; and that even as they continue to fight, their feelings about that fight are often mixed at best.
Trofimova is quite clear in the documentary, including in a bit of narration near the end, that she believes the invasion was wrong, that it was illegal, and that Russia must end the war immediately, to spare Ukrainian lives, but also those of Russian combatants.
Despite baseless accusations of Trofimova being a Russian state-backed operative, her matter-of-fact and mostly non-editorialized approach to capturing the drudgery and horror of the war experience is, for anyone convinced of Russia’s wrongdoing, understandably frustrating to watch.
Soldiers and others in the film regularly express their view, for example, that Ukraine is at fault for the war — whose roots stretch back to the 2014 war with Russian-backed separatists in Donbas and Russia’s annexation of Crimea — the truth of which is left ambiguous. Indeed, without casting aspersions on Trofimova’s personal beliefs about the war’s causes, the film is wholly uninterested in having that political-historical debate. Rather, what it offers is unfiltered insight into present conditions and contradictions.
In one scene, an elderly Ukrainian woman still living in her home just two kilometres from the front, with bombs regularly falling nearby, explains her support for the Russian occupiers. When she was in school, under the former Soviet Union, she was taught about Lenin and the glories of Russia. Ukraine is against Lenin, she explains. That modern Russia itself exists as a repudiation of the communist revolutionary doesn’t seem to enter her mind.
A Russian medic, a young woman, says that Soviet movies had the biggest influence on her as a child, and that some of the locals still believe the Soviet Union will return. This is the film putting the effects of propaganda and mistaken understandings on full display, however hard they might be to take. “Here I feel disgust, realizing I don’t understand what it’s all for,” the medic says.
Importantly, Trofimova does challenge her subjects, prodding them with questions about their views, purpose and actions in the war. Talking to one young soldier, she asks about war crimes Russians are alleged to have committed. He denies them, not because he knows for a fact they haven’t happened, but because he can’t understand why anyone would act so heinously, certainly not his comrades.
When she points out that it was Russia who invaded in the first place, he deflects, saying that they were simply given the order and followed it, admitting he doesn’t know whether the invasion was right. If conversation about the toll on the Ukrainian people is largely nonexistent among the soldiers, that’s a likely product of the difficulty in confronting the devastation they are perpetrating.
As more and more members of the battalion — eventually deployed to the hot zone of Bakhmut — are killed in the fighting, the true senselessness of the invasion is made very real, and very emotional. Grieving comrades and grieving families back home are left with much loss.
Talking about Russian leadership, one subject says simply, “People are being killed in droves and they don’t care.” It’s time to end the war, another soldier says, adding, “Let the enemy go home alive and well to their families, and us too.”
Charges of the film being Russian propaganda fall flat on their face. In fact, perhaps the most important audience for the film is the one least likely to see it: the Russian people.
