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Russian-Canadian director Anastasia Trofimova’s doc Russians at War makes its North American debut in Toronto this week, following a world premiere in Venice, amid calls from Ukrainian diplomats in Canada for the festival to pull the film.
The two-hour work, for which Trofimova embedded with Russian soldiers serving in Ukraine over a period of seven months, gives never before seen insight into their lives on the frontline.
The film’s empathetic gaze on these men as Russia continues to wage war in Ukraine – in a military campaign that has caused at least 35,000 civilian casualties, including 11,520 deaths; flattened cities, towns and villages, and displaced 16 million people – has provoked outrage in some quarters.
Comments on Deadline to an article on the film out of the Venice press conference, have likened Trofimova to German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, who was branded a Nazi propagandist for her films Triumph of the Will and Olympia, capturing the 1934 Nazi Party convention in Nuremberg and the 1936 Berlin Olympics in Berlin.
But unlike Riefenstahl’s films, which were in step with the Nazi Party as they glorified its leaders, military might and ideals around the perfect physique, Trofimova shows a Russian army made up of bewildered, dishevelled and ill-equipped men who are at times openly scornful of the politicians who sent them there.
There is no glory just botched military sorties; hiding, petrified in dug outs; shrapnel-shredded dead comrades being slung into trucks in body bags, and commanders in shell shock as they relive the day’s horrors. Any initial patriotic fervor dissipates, with the handful of subjects who survive to the end of the film questioning why they are there and expressing their lack of desire to fight, but suggesting they have no choice but to follow orders.
Trofimova was working as a news producer for Canada’s CBC when Russian President Vladimir Putin declared war on Ukraine on February 24, 2022, couching it in the euphemistic term of a “special military operation”.
As he made his television address, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was already underway, with the biggest full-scale attack on a European country since World War Two.
Trofimova was with CBC’s Moscow-based correspondent Tamara Altéresco and a cameraman in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, on an assignment to get a sense of whether people there thought war was imminent amid a build of Russian troops along the country’s border with Ukraine in the previous months.
“We were convincing our correspondent that she was nuts, absolutely crazy, [telling her], ‘There will be no war. It’s a dick measuring contest’, recounts Trofimova. “Pretty much all the ‘streeters’ that we did in the villages close to the border said exactly the same thing. No one believed that this would happen.”
She recalls a sense of deep shock when news of Putin’s announcement broke, saying it marked the end of Russia as she knew it.
“I was thinking, ‘How the hell is this actually possible?’,” says Trofimova, who grabbed some sleep between lives, waking a few hours later with a feeling “that something really shitty” had happened.
“Then I remembered what it was. We were at war… We lost about a 100 million people over the course of the wars and conflicts and upheavals of the last 100 years, starting from the Russian Revolution to World War Two to Chechnya to Afghanistan,” she says.
“Everybody has a relative who died in one of the conflicts. Pretty much everyone we were brought up with – our grandparents, people who served – would say, ‘May you always have peaceful skies’, and here we are, we do not have peaceful skies, the troops are going over the border, and what the fuck is going on?
“I realized that the world we used to live in no longer exists. Some people realized it faster. some slower. Some people want to hang onto the idea that it’s as if we still lived in Russia pre-February 24, 2022, but it’s no longer the case.”
Russia closed the CBC bureau Moscow two months later and stripped its staff of their visas and accreditations. More than 80 European and North American news outlets were kicked out of the country in the coming months, but as her international colleagues left the country, Trofimova, decided to stay on.
“It’s not my first war,” says the filmmaker and news producer who worked in Syria and Iraq. “When the war comes to my backyard, I’m not leaving.”
Trofimova spent the first year documenting every aspect of life in Russia under the war. During this time, she also connected with Canadian producer Cornelia Principe, who is producing, under the banner of Raja Pictures, with Sally Blake and Philippe Levasseur at Paris-based Capa Presse.
Principe wanted to make a wider documentary about how Russians were dealing with the war, fearing a new iron curtain was coming down as it became harder and harder to glean a true picture of what was happening in the country.
But Trofimova wanted to get to the front to understand what was the really going on beyond the patriotic posters on the streets of Moscow, featuring portraits of clean-cut soldiers, and censored local news bulletins.
“I traveled all over Russia, trying to speak to soldiers who were coming back from the war. They spoke to me, but in a very minimal way. They didn’t want to speak too much about it. I spoke to relatives who’d lost soldiers, who’d lost their sons. I spoke to human rights organizations,” she recounts.
She also combed the news out of Russia, Ukraine and the West in attempt to get a better picture.
“There were so many slogans and politics and analytics about the next chess move… but there was no human face. The human face of the war from the Russian side was formed by journalists who’d never seen it, because Russian soldiers almost never spoke to anyone because they’re not really allowed to,” says the director.
This gap made her even more determined to connect with Russian soldiers serving in the war.
“In history, we don’t remember which hill was taken, we remember human stories. We remember All Quiet On the Western Front,” she says.
“We don’t have that… this war is about slogans. It’s like a game. You pick a team, and you cheer for them, and that’s awful, because it’s human lives… We forgot everything we learned from the classics about war, because war is absolutely the same everywhere. It’s death, suffering, boredom, loss and, the inability to find yourself in this new world, which you didn’t choose to happen.”
Trofimova eventually found a way to the front through a soldier called Ilya, who she met while he was on leave, visiting his young family in Moscow.
He hailed from Luhansk, one of two Ukrainian regions, alongside Donetsk, partly seized by pro-Russian separatists in 2014, and then annexed by Russia in September 2022 alongside Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
The pro-Russian separatist fighter agreed to take Trofimova to his battalion in the Luhansk, in the northern part of Eastern Ukraine.
She joined him under the radar, without any sort of military authorization.
“I was not really allowed, but not really forbidden, to be in the rear. I stuck around and people slowly got used to me. They found me amusing and weird. This girl from Moscow who wanted to film them.”
Trofimova knew that the battalion was regrouping – training and awaiting a fresh injection of troops – and would soon be on the move closer to the front. When the commander, who had tacitly allowed Trofimova to stay, refused her permission to join this movement, the soldiers she had befriended offered to smuggle her to the front.
“They were like, ‘How about this? When the column moves, we’ll put you in the truck, and then once you get to the front, it’s a bit more chaotic there and you can kind of see what happens’,” recounts Trofimova.
The commander soon learned of her presence after he came into the Soviet nuclear bunker where the soldiers were bedding down for a few nights while on the move.
“I pretended to be a piece of the furniture. He looks at me and is like, ‘Ah, the journalist fucking made it here’,” says Trofimova.
She managed to stay on but kept her distance from the main command headquarters. By this time, she had built a rapport with the men and women in Ilya’s unit, and they were becoming increasingly talkative about their experiences.
“I guess they wanted to share their story, because what they saw in the media was so far from their reality. A lot of them asked me, ‘Why do none of the big channels come here to show our life and what it’s really about, because what we see on TV doesn’t really reflect what we’re going through here,” she says.
There have scores of documented atrocities committed by Russian soldiers in Ukraine over the course of the invasion, but Trofimova batted back suggestions at the Venice press conference that she was attempting to whitewash the actions of the Russian army.
The director says she saw no evidence of war crimes during her time on the front, and that if she had it would be in the film. Trofimova does admit, however, to censoring dialogue, where her subjects were directly critical of Putin, or his government, out of concern for the future safety of her subjects.
“My number one concern throughout this whole film was to keep my characters out of harm’s way. I tried to keep it to their personal emotions and stories, because it’s also always that much more stronger than statements, generic statements about politics.”
Trofimova double and triple-checked with the interviewees on whether they were happy about appearing in the film.
“I kept bringing it up because I was so paranoid… the soldiers basically got tired of me at some point, and were like, “Piss off, they’re not going to send us further than the front. It can’t get much worse.”
The elephant in the room, from a Ukrainian and Western perspective, is the fact that the men and women featured in Russians at War would not be living the hellish experience captured in the film, if Russia had not invaded Ukraine in 2022
But even with the political comments largely culled, the disillusionment of the soldiers and anger of people who have lost children and grandchildren, is starkly obvious in the film. It is unlikely Putin or his government will be happy with this portrait of the Russian army.
Trofimova, who left Russia for France a month ago to work on post-production and also edit a TV version for Ontario’s TVO network and other channels, says it is too early for her to gauge whether it will be safe for her to return to Russia.
“I’m not sure what the reaction will be in Russia to this film from the authorities. Unfortunately, I went there without permission but it’s very important for world history, but most importantly for Russian history, for us to see ourselves in a way where we can look and reflect on what is happening and the people who are fighting this war.”
In the backdrop, Trofimova also faces a backlash online and from some Western media for her sympathetic depiction of Russian soldiers, but she stands by the work.
“I didn’t film on the Ukrainian front, I filmed on the Russian front, so I’ll speak for what I’ve seen. I definitely don’t think his war brings anything good to Russia. I hope it will finish and will not escalate,” she says.
“It’s not my first war, and the more I see war, the more I realize how precious diplomacy is, with all its setbacks and all its problems. It’s the only way to finish this War, because militarily, it’s not going to happen and more people are going to die. Everyday somebody in Ukraine and in Russia is becoming an orphan or widow, and this has to stop.”
