2000 Metres to Andriivka: Bearing Witness to a War Without End

Two thousand metres of shattered forest, three months of crawling death. Boys became soldiers, soldiers became ghosts. And in the end, nothing remained but the flag.

Yesterday, in the heart of a city living under the shadow of war, I found myself in a cinema with my dear friend Vovo. It felt almost illicit, an act of defiance against the rupture of daily life that armed conflict brings. In this war zone, stories do not travel far; they are stifled by isolation, by the trenches that surround both minds and bodies. Men above eighteen cannot leave. They are expected to fight, to stay, to defend. Women may go, but only without their men, carrying their grief and worry across borders.

Outside, the streets were grey, the air heavy with the tension that has defined Ukraine since 2014, when the Kremlin, enraged by the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych, began the long, grinding conflict that culminated in the full-scale invasion of February 2022. Inside the cinema, though, the mood was charged with a different kind of electricity, not escape, but confrontation.

We had come to the 22nd International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival in Kyiv. The film we wer…