‘The soldiers want you to see what they're going through': the heartbreaking follow-up to 20 Days in Mariupol

The Guardian

15-07-2025

It was in Sloviansk, in the rear of eastern Ukraine's frontline, that I first met journalist and film-maker Mstyslav Chernov. It was the autumn of 2023 and he was telling me about the film that would later win him and his team an Oscar: 20 Days in Mariupol, a horrifying documentary assembled from the news footage he and his team had gathered there, in the first month of the full-scale invasion. That September day of our interview, though – amid what would turn out to be Ukraine's disappointing counteroffensive of 2023 – he was making his second film, one that took him to the heart of the combat zone, called 2,000 Meters to Andriivka. It is, if anything, even more powerful than its predecessor: a piece of frontline reporting that truly deserves the name, its footage gathered from soldiers' own bodycams as well as from Chernov and his small crew on the ground among them. He puts the viewer into the trenches alongside the combatants. It is terrifying, bloody and heartbreakingly sad. You will not emerge from this film unchanged.
The soldiers on whom Chernov focuses are members of Ukraine's 3rd Assault Brigade. They have a mission: to liberate the village of Andriivka, in the Donetsk region, and hoist the blue-and-yellow flag above it. Their sole route to this village is through a narrow strip of forest with flat, open fields either side. The wood, with its sketchy cover, is both their protection and, in many cases, their grave. The painful, dangerous advance through this 2km provides the structure of the film. And yet, for all that the film borrows the conventions of a thriller for its propulsive plotline, it is its tenderness, both in its gaze and in the relationships between the men that it depicts, that really destroyed me.
This tenderness, this melancholia, is partly a result of what happened after the shoot, Chernov tells me: during the months of editing, most of the men he focused on were killed. In the film they do indeed raise the flag over Andriivka, or what was left of it, which was piles of abject rubble. But in 2024 it was lost again. And so 2,000 Meters to Andriivka may be a thriller of sorts. But on a deeper level, it is a lament and a memorial. 'The film slowly became more about honouring memory, honouring names,' says Chernov. The news of the deaths trickled in while he was standing on red carpets for 20 Days in Mariupol. One reached him while he was in London picking up a Bafta. 'There was always guilt,' he says, 'there was always a feeling of the absurd to know what's happening with those men and boys while I was experiencing the normality of the world outside Ukraine.'
He talks about the Ukrainian premiere of 2,000 Meters to Andriivka, in Kyiv in May. The relatives of the dead men came. They had not seen the movie in advance. One of the characters, whose callsign, or military nickname, was Sheva, talks about his wife in the film. After the screening – which was followed by a 10-minute standing ovation – that woman came to Chernov, he says, and told him: 'Thank you: now I will be able to show his grandson who his grandfather was.' He adds: 'I could strip this film down to one basic meaning: which is of being able to salvage at least pieces of these people's lives, for their families.'
What is so touching about the moments in which we get to know Sheva is that he comes across as anything but conventionally heroic. He even asks Chernov to stop filming him: he hasn't done anything worth recording yet, he says. But despite his evident fear, he is doing it anyway: which some might say was the definition of true bravery.
One night in Kyiv, a Ukrainian friend asked me if I thought the film was anti-war. It is a good question. It is clear from Chernov's work that he hates war – and he told me so, in so many words. But to call it anti-war would be a category error. It is true that there is absolutely no glory in 2,000 Meters. It is true that it dares to show us the pain of wounded men, their deaths, ordinary humans, who had ordinary jobs before the invasion, bleeding out for a few metres of Ukrainian soil. It is true that the men's goal might seem futile – raising a Ukrainian flag over a pile of ruined houses is a strange kind of 'liberation' for the village of Andriivka, which has become a mere name, rather than any kind of community. But Chernov shows deep respect and empathy for the fighters who, with tight-lipped determination, are trying to fend off Russia's violent and pointless aggression. War came to them – to their homes, to their families, to their land – and they are having to fight it.
The camera lingers on the breathtaking, big-skied landscapes of eastern Ukraine: expansive forests, glorious steppe, stretches of it burned and scarred by trenches and tanks beyond recognition. The film unfolds not far from Chernov's native city of Kharkiv, 18 miles (30km) from the Russian border. 'This is the landscape of my childhood,' he says. 'This is what you see when you go to your grandmother's village house, and then you run off to a field and steal some corn when you're hungry, or play hide and seek in the forest with your friends. These landscapes are part of our DNA.' That connection was partly what made him and his crew take cameras and move among the fighters in the thick of the battle, at great risk to their lives. 'This film could have existed purely in its bodycam form,' he says, 'but it was incredibly important for me to actually walk on that ground, to experience those landscapes and to feel how they changed. To feel the pain and the anger and the surprise that I can't recognise them any more, that I feel that I'm on another planet, that I feel that I am in forests of Verdun 100 years ago, rather than next to my home town.'
Specific the landscape may be, but Chernov talks too about finding inspiration in the first world war paintings of Paul Nash – particularly We Are Making a New World, whose shell-pitted northern French landscape could be straight out of the Donetsk region. I am reminded, too, of another bleak painting in the Imperial War Museum: Christopher Nevinson's Paths of Glory. It shows two British soldiers face down, dead, in the forest. It was banned at the time by British censors: dead German soldiers were acceptable in a painting, but dead British soldiers were not. Chernov's film, I am absolutely sure, would not have survived that kind of censorship. It is too raw, too tragic. It shows the death of Ukrainian men, though, after debates in the edits, the screen mercifully blacks out during the moments of oblivion – an effect akin to the way you can't help closing your eyes in fear, Chernov says, when something explodes near you.
The film has a deep moral purpose: it wants to show the reality of war, beyond the positive political speeches and the Ukrainian media's 'avoiding of difficult news'. 'There is an acknowledged problem,' says Chernov, 'and that's probably the problem that's troubling the Ukrainian soldiers the most right now. It's not the lack of support by the US. It's not the fact that Russia is clearly not prepared to finish this war. It's not the fact that the soldiers [will] probably need to stay at the frontline for years and keep fighting and losing their friends. It's the fact that part of Ukrainian society has distanced itself from the soldiers.'
It is true: spending time in Ukraine, it is clear this is a subject of deep national anxiety. People worry, with justification, how the gaps in experience between them – between those on the frontline, those with family members fighting, those who are refugees, those who have avoided the draft – will ever be stitched together. Chernov tells me about a special screening he held for soldiers that happened to be in an ordinary Kyiv multiplex, where the other visitors were eating popcorn and watching blockbusters. 'I could see the faces of the soldiers that came out from the cinema after watching 2,000 Meters,' he says. 'And they said to me, 'Mstyslav, we want these people to go and see 2,000 Meters. We want them to know what we are going through.''
The film is, he says, all about distance. Those perilous 2km to Andriivka, of course, but also implicitly about 'the 3,000km to Paris. About what Russian TV tells its own people: that it would take a Russian tank only 24 hours to get to the Bundestag. Or 20 minutes for a Russian nuclear missile to fly to London.' And the distance between the combatants' beating hearts and the viewers of the film – which is zero.
2,000 Meters to Andriivka is out on 11 August