The war in Ukraine cannot end well if 2000 Meters to Andriivka is anything to go by. A bulletin from the frontline during Ukraine’s counter-offensive in 2023, it paints a bleak picture of two countries at war, one of them fighting for its life, the other kicking sand in its face. (As I type in late December 2025 a lousy peace settlement is being hashed out, with the USA apparently urging Ukraine to hand chunks of the country to Russia while Ukraine’s fellow Europeans look on impotently.)
The magic in this movie happens mostly in the edit suite, where all the (mostly bodycam) footage from a mission to liberate the Ukrainian village of Andriivka is stitched together. To add old-school reportage, and handheld cameras, director Mstyslav Chernov and fellow cinematographer Alex Babenko are along for the ride, much to the disbelief of many of the soldiers they are embedded with. Why would you elect to be in this hellhole?
The soldiers are not wrong. The overall impression here is of human life being spent to achieve not very much at all, like all those tales of men dying in the First World War to capture a few meters of abandoned trench.
Here it’s a pitiful slog through a “forest” – a minefield-flanked two-kilometre corridor that’s been so heavily shelled that there’s barely a tree still standing – in an attempt to cut Russian supply lines by taking Andriivka, a village near Bakhmut in the Donetsk Oblast.
Softly spoken, lightly accented voiceover by the Ukrainian Chernov sets the scene and adds in soldiers’ names and background detail. Though it’s really the pictures that tell the story – men, many of them not that young, with exhaustion in their eyes, trying to stave off the sense of futility with gallows humour and wistful reminiscence of back home, anticipation of a hot shower, a sauna. The men often talk like characters from a war movie. One explains that a bullet either has your name on it or not – fate. Chernov’s voiceover informs us that five months after this, that particular soldier was injured in battle and his body never found.
Another man, Sheva, a grandfather aged 46, talks of what he’s going to do when it’s all over. A sure sign, in the movies, that it’s not going to end well for him.
The Ukrainians take care of their dead and pull their bodies off the battlefield. The Russians aren’t so fastidious, and in images reminiscent of Don McCullin’s Vietnam photographs, there’s many a corpse rotting inside a Russian army uniform.
Helmetcam footage occasionally renders everything as a shoot-em-up game, the barrel of a gun in the foreground, a Ukrainian soldier yelling “Why did you come here, you fucker. You destroyed my home,” as he hurtles into a hail of fire.
Prisoners are taken alive, amazingly (though probably not always) and we see one Russian being coaxed out of his trench, only to be shot dead when he tries to lob a grenade towards the Ukrainians. The sharpness of the imagery from the cameras – whether on the soldiers, the Chernov and Babenko stuff or the occasional drone shot – is remarkable. The drone shots are particularly chilling – a few men scattered, hopelessly exposed, attempting to inch forward using the trees as cover, though the trees are little more than splinters.
The overall impression is the usual cliché, I’m afraid. It’s the hellish waste of human life, the poignancy of it all, one side fighting for god knows what reason, the others defending their homeland out of a sense of fatalistic patriotism.
Not included is the backstory of Chernov, a fine-art photographer who wandered into war photography by accident and wound up winning an Oscar for the film 20 Days in Mariupol. What does he get out of it? Sleepless nights, I don’t wonder.
2000 Meters to Andriivka – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
