The question, terrifying precisely because of its simplicity, comes from a young Ukrainian soldier answering his commander’s weary request for a smile at the end of a brutal day. It lands like a hammer blow in the final moments of Mstyslav Chernov’s 2000 Meters to Andriivka.
The film’s narrative carries faint echoes of Saving Private Ryan: It is a war travelogue.
A small group of journalists and the Ukrainian army platoon must enter a village near Bakhmut, razed to its “ground zero,” and capture the moment when a fighter from the 3rd Assault Brigade raises the Ukrainian flag.
To get there, they must first reach an assault team battling on the village outskirts, then advance with them into the ruins.
The only possible path is a 2-kilometer stretch of shredded treeline, 30 to 50 meters wide – where they must crawl, sprint, and hide from mortar fire and drone attacks in abandoned dugouts.
Stepping out into the fields is impossible: they’re dense minefields that, from a drone’s perspective, resemble a lunar landscape pockmarked with hundreds of craters.
Chernov builds the film from starkly raw footage – helmet-cam video from actual 3rd Assault Brigade fighters intertwined with the crew’s own material. Part of the team works inside the battle command center, coordinating fighters in real time over the radio and directing drone reconnaissance; the rest is out there on the line.
The combat footage and the quiet, tense conversations with those undertaking this deadly journey hit with equal force. This is war stripped to its essence: no rhetoric, no banner-waving, just the grinding routine of danger and death.
As the film unfolds, Chernov informs us when people we’ve just watched and listened to, soldiers talking about tomorrow, are killed.
Andriivka, or what was left of it, was liberated in September 2023 during Ukraine’s heavily publicized counteroffensive. Not long after, it was lost again to Russian forces.
The film’s protagonists are “ordinary Ukrainians,” people who left ordinary civilian jobs and picked up weapons. They don’t speak in grand slogans; they simply do the exhausting, lethal work because they believe there is no alternative.
“You want to say something to this fucking forest?” a journalist asks a soldier after the mission ends.
“I’m sick of trampling around in this forest,” the fighter (callsign Fedya) answers with blunt honesty. “Sorry,” he adds. “I just want to go home. I want to have a meal, wash, and sleep… just sleep.”
Yet we know he’ll keep “trampling” – his own modest word for what is, unmistakably, heroism.
This is the real Ukraine. Not the “opinion leaders,” not the “public intellectuals,” not the politicians, nor the pixel-camouflaged weekend warriors who “fight” at a safe distance from the front. This is the Ukraine that truly deserves support, compassion, and respect.
We don’t need hollow, bombastic patriotism. We need films like this.
Watch it. It shoots straight into the heart.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.