A War Film to Change All War Films

The fighting in Ukraine has, in many ways, transformed the nature of warfare. As many as 80 percent of battle casualties are now inflicted by drones, not machine guns, artillery, or missiles. That number is likely to be similar for armored vehicles and other equipment at the front. As NATO commanders scramble to adapt to the new technologies and ways of fighting, their old military doctrines are no longer worth the paper they’re written on.

Yet the war has also revolutionized how we witness war. Since it started in February 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been an oddly intimate affair, flooding the world with unprecedented close-ups of the battlefield. This is the result of the wide use of two powerful technologies: the camera-equipped drone and the GoPro-style action camera. Drones offer startlingly clear views of battlefields and chart the final moments of flying munitions zeroing in on their targets. Bodycams bring the viewer directly into the action—sometimes too close for comfort. We used to talk about the “fog of war.” Now military planners, in Ukraine and beyond, are struggling coming to terms with the transparent battlefield, where almost every move can be observed and countered in real time.

The Ukrainian filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov and his colleagues, who won the Oscar for best documentary in 2024 for their film 20 Days in Mariupol, have created a record of the war that uses both of these tools to powerful effect. 2000 Meters to Andriivka tracks a particular moment in the Ukrainian counteroffensive of 2023, when Kyiv’s soldiers made a heroic but ultimately failed attempt to push the Russians back. The soldiers in the film are trying to capture the tiny village of Andriivka in the Donbas region, a few miles from the city of Bakhmut, a place that has seen some of the war’s most vicious fighting. To do so, they must move forward one mile through what they refer to as “the forest”—which is actually a narrow strip of greenery, flanked by fields, where nearly every tree has been blasted to bits by artillery fire.

Chernov and his colleague Alex Babenko shadow the troops, using their own cameras to capture events in the same ways war correspondents have been doing since the advent of hand-held cameras. But the film also draws heavily on helmet cam footage from the soldiers themselves—most memorably in the film’s opening sequence, where we witness Ukrainian troops in the midst of a Russian artillery barrage. Some of them are killed, others seriously wounded. The survivors manage to pile into an armored personnel carrier—but just when they think they’re about to escape, their ride gets stuck in the mud, forcing them to seek other ways out of the inferno.

The resulting film is the most extraordinary record of combat I’ve ever seen, and it’s no surprise that it was shortlisted for the Oscar for best documentary this week. Fictional movies like Black Hawk Down or Saving Private Ryan come to mind—but both of those works feel contrived, especially in the ways they bend over backwards to provide redemption to their heroes. Chernov’s film offers little in the way of consolation; most of its soldiers have died by the time the film premiered for the public. Other famous documentary footage simply can’t compete—even in the best Vietnam-era works, which capture the intensity of combat well, the enemy is almost always unseen, lurking somewhere in the jungle. Here, there enemy is close by. (At one point the Ukrainians capture a Russian officer, who is pathetic and terrified.) There is an unsparing directness to this account, a cruel nakedness that mimics the denuded landscape in which it takes place.

Noting the technological advances, Chernov told Foreign Policy that filmmakers have “finally reached that point in storytelling where we are able to actually say how horrible war is and express it.” He argued that literature and movies have generally had a tendency to romanticize war—something he is desperate to avoid: “This war is so incredibly painful for me and so incredibly personal that the worst thing I could try to do is to romanticize it and beautify it.” He said that he’s aiming instead for a form of hyperrealism that will enable the viewer “to experience the horror and pain.”

The film certainly does that. It is filled with unpleasantly indelible images. A soldier lying in a foxhole cries out that his legs have just been broken by a shell blast. An armored transporter lowers its door—but before the men can get out, a Russian machine gun opens up on them, exploding into the tiny space. Men pushing through the forest under intense Russian fire find one of their friends lying dead on the ground. As Ukrainian troops finally emerge into the outskirts of Andriivka, they find themselves moving through a shell-pocked landscape strewn with Russian and Ukrainian corpses.

Andriivka itself exemplifies the fundamental absurdity of the conflict. It is a blistered wasteland of scattered bricks and twisted metal; why should anyone sacrifice their lives to capture it? One of the soldiers expresses the hope that the place will one day rise from the ashes. Chernov told me later that he finds this hard to imagine.

The film has its moments of consoling humanity. In a quiet moment, a 46-year-old soldier who goes by the call sign “Sheva” chats with one of the filmmakers about his fears. He is worried about his wife, he says, who worries endlessly about him. He worries whether he’s done enough to ensure the water supply from the well back at home; he worries that the toilet needs fixing. He feels vaguely guilty about being filmed: “I haven’t done anything heroic yet, and here I am on camera.” Chernov informs us in a voice-over that that’s not quite true. Sheva, he says, had the chance to stay behind the lines in a military police unit but volunteered to join the assault troops instead. Five months after the interview, we learn, he died in a hospital from serious wounds from a different battle.

Chernov described this scene as fundamental to his understanding of the film, which is marked, he said, by his own fundamental ambivalence toward the conflict. “I am absolutely horrified and disgusted by the idea of war,” he told me. “War is the worst thing humanity does to itself, and we should not let it happen. At the same time, it’s important for me to be honoring the courage and the sacrifice of these men who in different circumstances would simply be my friends and colleagues.”

In our interview, Chernov noted that the film has acquired added meaning since it emerged that Donald Trump and his envoy Steve Witkoff have been pressing the Ukrainians to surrender the entire Donbas to Moscow—including the very same territory we see soldiers shedding blood for in the film. (Spoiler: The soldiers manage to capture Andriivka just before the end of the counteroffensive. Later, we are informed in the film, the Russians took it back again.)

As I watched, I began to wonder if it could have been made and shown in Putin’s Russia. When I posed this question to Chernov, he laughed, saying that he saw a Russian documentary some time back that was “relatively honest” in offering an unvarnished view of the war. The Russian authorities weren’t very happy with it, he said, and took it off the air. When he Googled the film’s title, he was unable to find it, coming up only with movies that echo the Soviet war propaganda of old.

Such abstractions are alien to this film. One soldier asks plaintively: “What if the war lasts until the end of our lives?” In its harsh honesty and tender attentiveness to the humanity of those doing the fighting, 2000 Meters to Andriivka is a masterpiece of bitterness and brutality. In a better world, Chernov would have never had to make it.