The longer the war in
Ukraine continues, the easier it has become for it to feel abstract, with the initial horror at seeing such devastating conflict in Europe growing normalised. The deeply immersive
BBC Two documentary Ukraine: Enemy in the Woods was a sharp reminder that it mustn’t be, as it brought home the frontline reality with a close-up, visceral thump. Using bodycams attached to the soldiers’ helmets, director Jamie Roberts ’s extraordinary film followed one 99-strong Ukrainian company, the Berlingo Battalion, as it defended a vital railway line that runs through a forest on the eastern front. If this railway line fell, the way to Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv , would be open to the invading “orcs” (the troops’ favoured word for the enemy). This was a tightly specific snapshot of the fighting, one unit defending some 500 metres of the whole 1,500km front line. And yet there was a timeless, universal feel to the cat-and-mouse combat, with troops ducking for cover as snipers ambushed them and they blindly returned fire. Though it was filmed only last November, as fresh as the
SNOW covering the blasted forest, it could also have been, say, the Ardennes offensive of 1944 or (especially in the way troops hid in underground bunkers) a scene from the First World War. In fact, the only reminder that this was 2023 were the drones that whirred, all-seeing, above the battlefront, dropping grenades on the troops as they dashed – the sound of their heavy breathing audible from their bodycams – from foxhole to foxhole. The featured combatants included battalion commander Dmytro, unit commander Vovan, drone pilot Viktor (who likened his
Job to going fishing), and the battalion’s only woman, Natalia, a young trainee vet turned army medic. Would she ever treat a wounded Russian, Natalia was asked. “Maybe I would,” she replied. “We are not like them… we don’t have to lose our humanity.” Otherwise, pity for the enemy was in short supply. “They’re not people to me,” remarked Dmytro, while Vovan sprayed wounded Russians with machine-gun
fire – the screen turned to black at this point. (“I finished them,” Vovan appeared to confirm later.) The otherwise unsparing documentary also showed respectful restraint by blurring the faces of dead soldiers. Read Next I spent weeks on Ukraine's front line - it looks like a dystopian film And there were an awful of dead Russians scattered across the forest floor. You wondered about the poor conscripts being used as cannon fodder by the
Kremlin. For the Ukrainian defenders, too, there was a weary amazement at the number of soldiers being thrown into the remorseless meat grinder of war. “We kill a thousand of them,” said Dmitry, “And they send a thousand more.” Putin, like Stalin before him , shows no regard for the lives of his fighters. The
Russian troops are fed propaganda horror stories about captives being tortured by the Ukrainians, which is why very few surrender. The two Russian prisoners shown here were well-treated while being asked why they were fighting. For the money, said one despondently. Suddenly given a human face, these shivering captives just added to the overall sense of the futility of war. This was an unflinching look at one of the many battles raging daily across the eastern front. We saw some of the Ukrainian comrades being hit by enemy fire, one of them shot in the lung and with a finger blown off. Others were discovered slaughtered in their foxhole observation posts. Perhaps the most extraordinary sequence was a nocturnal firefight illuminated only by the muzzle flashes of opposing guns. The film almost ended on an upbeat note, as Vovan and other survivors drove back to Kyiv for reunions with their loved ones. A postscript however informed us that during their seven-week rotation, 66 out of the 99 troops had been seriously wounded, with 10 deaths. “We are a family,” said Natalia, her eyes darting around with what looked like incipient PTSD. It was not difficult to feel for her trauma. The chaos of war has rarely, if ever, been depicted with this much intimacy. ‘Ukraine: Enemy in the Woods’ is on BBC Two tonight at 9pm and streaming on BBC iPlayer .