KUYANSK – “Stop the car and put on your body armor.” Zack, a former British paratrooper and machine gunner, leads us to a destroyed petrol station. As we put on our helmets and body armor, there were explosions nearby. We continue driving to Kupyansk. A frontline town nestled in a valley in northeastern Ukraine, a hotspot in the war with Russia.
I’m here to make a BBC film about the frontline through the eyes of Ukrainian fighters. The front line between Russia and Ukraine stretches 932 miles, and cameras rarely get to see the scale and intensity of the fighting up close.
Kupyansk looks like something out of a dystopian blockbuster. Russian and Ukrainian artillery positions exchanged fire over houses and shops. We passed a destroyed school, an apartment building with a damaged facade, a destroyed government building.There are some signs of life; some scarf A German shepherd accompanied a one-legged man in and out of the post office at a central intersection, and a man cooked kebabs on a charcoal grill outside an empty restaurant.
Before I left London, several Ukrainian brigades invited me to shoot with them to show the reality of their daily struggle against the Russians on the front lines where few news crews go. When I arrived they were broken down which was impossible. I received video of a group attacking the position over the summer; all but one man were killed. A shocking 85% of the brigade’s soldiers were seriously wounded or killed.
Russia’s full-scale invasion had been underway for nearly two years when I arrived, and it continues to influence global geopolitics, from elections to gas prices. “How can you get tired of war when you’re not a participant in it?” asked a soldier named Eugene as we discussed “war fatigue” in the West.
In Kupyansk we were met by two soldiers: Sergei and Commander Dmytro. We followed their jeep to a railroad track that had become a makeshift road and past a concrete checkpoint. We approached a bridge that had been blown up to stop the Russian advance and built a makeshift pontoon bridge to help cross the frozen river.
We came to a house in the suburbs. Hail rocket munitions fall nearby and shelling is just background noise, a daily reality for people here. Commander Demytro takes me inside. Hot weather. Machine guns lined the walls. Soldiers milled around, cleaning weapons, making soup, and resting in sleeping bags on the floor.
Commander Dmytro showed me live footage from the drone, which transmitted images of the nearby forest and explained the situation. The Russians hope to control a railway line through the forest and use it as a supply route to advance towards Kharkov, Ukraine’s second largest city. Commander Dmytro and his men are here to stop the Russians.
This is Berlingo Battalion: their mission will be the focus of our BBC documentary Ukraine: Enemies in the woods.
I visited the group’s command center, located in the basement of a wrecked building. From here, the soldiers deployed over three days into the forest, where they fought in icy foxholes under constant fire to fend off the Russian attack. The bunkers were built quickly and provided little protection from Russian fire. They came back dirty and with frostbitten limbs.
Natalia, 27, from Kiev, carries a Kalashnikov and cares for returning soldiers at home. She laughed when I asked her about the medications she was taking – “just painkillers, not much else”. Natalia was a veterinarian before the war, specializing in treating dogs. The army rejected her initial attempt to join. As the war continued, they signed her up to be a combat medic. Natalia slept in a flood-prone basement near the front lines. She is the only woman in the company.
The soldiers here are either very young, 19 to 20 years old, or quite old, 40 to 50 years old. Many men of combat age were killed or wounded, leaving the middle age range of soldiers who would normally have been expected to fill the void hollowed out. Core infantry (around 22 to 35 years old).
Ukraine’s military is in dire need of manpower, and conscription has become a sensitive issue for President Zelensky’s government, which is working to lower the age of enlistment from 27 to 25. Many Ukrainians who refused to join the army have left the country or simply don’t want to join. Died defending a frozen trench. This disagreement creates friction.
“Here we face a completely different reality. You meet your friends and have nothing to say. They are not interested in hearing some of my stories. I am not interested in their new mobile phone or their new car,” explains Natalia road.
These soldiers were civilians before the war; bricklayers, steelworkers, students, painters and decorators who dreamed of becoming truck drivers. They are incredibly efficient, but Russia’s “flesh wave” attacks – sustained attacks regardless of the death toll – and the sheer number of troops Vladimir Putin is willing to sacrifice make the prospect of combat dire. “If the Russians win, they will kill us for being soldiers or put us in concentration camps, so we have to keep fighting,” Eugen told me.
Commander Dmytro believes that if Russia is not stopped, his battle in the forest will move to the border of NATO country Poland, where the war will escalate exponentially. “If we don’t fight the Russians here, they will continue to take your land,” he said.
Over the next few weeks, I photographed and equipped the soldiers with the means to photograph themselves. We used high-resolution POV helmet-mounted cameras to record hours of action, combined with intimate observational filming and interviews to give soldiers an emotional reflection on the war. I checked out a video recorded by our protagonist Vovan.
In the film, he leaves the bunker to search for two missing comrades. He discovers dozens of Russian corpses in the snow and approaches a bunker to find out what happened to his friends. It’s a bloody, harrowing scene, but it’s the visceral reality we’re here to capture. When Wowan returned to base, glassy-eyed and chain-smoking, he recalled: “It would be great if I could take a pill to erase my memory.”
Ukraine: Enemies in the woods To be broadcast on BBC Two Monday, March 25, 9 p.m.and on iPlayer
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