Review: A landmark of combat journalism, ‘2000 Meters to Andriivka’ is a pummeling dispatch from Ukraine’s frontline

We know from headlines that small-scale technologies such as drones have transformed war, most urgently affecting Ukraine’s ability to stay in a bruising battle for its existence against Russia. But it’s done the same for covering war too, especially the kind of fleet, up-close dispatch of which we can now say Ukrainian filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov is a master.

The Associated Press correspondent’s follow-up to his harrowing, Oscar-winning “20 Days in Mariupol,” which rendered the first weeks of Russia’s invasion inside a city under siege, is another intimate perspective on his country’s devastation. But this time it’s from the frontlines of Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive, specifically one brigade’s nightmarish trek to liberate a Russian-occupied town. In its heart-stopping intimacy — courtesy of helmet-cams, drones and the foxhole connection between citizen soldier and countryman journalist — “2000 Meters to Andriivka” is a war chronicle like no other.

Right away, Chernov introduces us to war’s chaos with bodycam footage from a Ukrainian soldier named Piro. It’s a dugout POV capturing how a lull marked by jokes and cigarettes can quickly become enemy fire, screaming and artillery shells flying. A retreat is abandoned when the platoon’s armored carrier gets stuck. In the ensuing scramble, comrades are hit and we hear a resigned, “That’s it for me.” Suddenly this view feels less like one from a trench but a grave.

No wonder Chernov’s measured narration sounds bleaker. His speculative dread from “Mariupol” has been replaced by a fact-driven weariness. He and AP colleague Alex Babenko press on, embedding themselves in a battalion tasked with a one-mile push to retake the town of Andriivka near a Russian stronghold. The path, however, is a thin ribbon of forest hiding Russians in trenches, fortified on each side by open minefields.

Also, the designation “forest” seems generous: The gnarled and stripped trees look broken, suggesting an open wasteland instead of a battleground that could provide cover. They’ve clearly already seen plenty of destruction, and by the end of the film, they’ll have seen more. Chernov tells us that one soldier described this unrecognizable homeland to him as like “landing on a planet where everything is trying to kill you.”

The first-person footage as the group advances is breathless and dense with gunfire, yelling and the sense that each inch will be hard-won on the way to planting that Ukrainian flag in Andriivka, which, from drone shots, already looks decimated. (The film is broken into chapters indicating meters gained.) “I came to fight, not to serve,” says this brigade’s war dog of a leader, a former warehouse worker named Fedya who at one point is shot but makes his way back to the mission after being evacuated for treatment.

Still, during long foxhole waits, when the only visible smoke is from a cigarette, Chernov’s gentle off-camera queries to Fedya’s men (ranging from the hopelessly young to a 40-something new grandfather) elicit touching optimism for a return to normal life: a shower, a job, friendly rivalries over trivial matters, the chance to smoke less, to fix a toilet back home, to rebuild. Then Chernov’s voiceover comes in for the softly spoken hammer-blow peek into the future: which of these guys will die in later battles or perhaps never be found. This is gutting stuff.

There’s never been as immersive a war documentary as “2000 Meters in Andriivka,” cleaving as it does to the swings between peril and blessed boredom, mixing overhead shots (including a suicide drone’s vantage) and underground views like a dystopian saga. War is hell, but Ukraine’s survival is paramount. The senselessness, however, seems a constant. “Why are you here?” a Ukrainian soldier barks at a captured Russian, who mutters back, “I don’t know why we’re here.”