Sean Langan’s intriguing but curious documentary, Ukraine’s War: The Other Side, comes to a halt on a log in a wood the Russians call Sherwood Forest, near the frontline town of Avdiivka. It is the Russian’s most forward position but the location is of no apparent military significance, and it is no longer obvious to the film-maker why he or the soldiers escorting him have risked their lives to go there.
“I thought I’d find some answers in the forest but all I found was more death and destruction,” Langan narrates at the end of an hour and 40-minute ITV1 programme where the independent film-maker – uniquely for a Briton – had access to Russian soldiers and civilians on the eastern front of the near two-year war.
The log is a place that hundreds of Russians died trying to reach just before last Easter. “Christ has risen,” the soldiers say with dry irony. In the mud beneath Langan lies spent shells; above are shattered trees – and both images bring to mind the protracted struggles of the first world war. After promising to explain better the Russian perspective, Langan’s film ends instead by questioning the war itself.
“We are not invaders,” one Russian soldier says justifying Moscow’s bloody and unprovoked invasion of its neighbour in familiar, simplistic terms. “We’re just protecting what is ours.”
But there is a look of disappointment when Langan says Americans are not protesting against the war as if it were Vietnam. “I met a lot of good men on the frontlines,” he narrates shortly afterwards, “but in years to come, I couldn’t help wondering how many will still believe in the cause.”
Langan filmed over three trips in Russian-occupied Donbas, two in autumn 2022 before the final visit the following Easter. So rare is his access, clearly carefully mediated by his well-connected fixer, Sasha – “I’m pro Ukrainian, but the Ukrainian government is against the Ukrainian people right now” – that it is tempting to conclude there must be a propagandistic purpose in the ensuing film.
But it is not quite the case, as Langan’s weary conclusion makes clear. Throughout the documentary is careful enough to stress who is at fault for the invasion – Russia, and the overall narrative positioning justifies ITV’s decision to air it on its main channel, even in the aftermath of the death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, widely believed to have been orchestrated by the Kremlin.
There are some lapses though. A soldier in a balaclava tells Langan he was at Bucha, north of Kyiv, in the early weeks of the war. But he is allowed to speak unchallenged when he suggests the subsequent discovery of war crimes was fabricated in the days after the Russians retreated. Ukraine said 458 bodies were found, of which 419 were shot, tortured or beaten to death, but Langan notes in the commentary that, while the UN did document cases of unlawful killings and executions of civilians in Bucha, he does not feel safe in pressing the soldier further.
At other points, the mask slips completely. Timofey Yermakov, a Russian war blogger, says “we are not monsters” before concluding the war in Ukraine will only end “when we kill the last Nazi”, which somewhat undermines his plea for sympathy. But in others, as when a woman living near in a deserted suburb of Donetsk city makes him coffee in her flat, we simply see people caught on the far side of a frontline.
Background shelling brings their conversation to a hasty conclusion, and the sound of outgoing and incoming artillery is constant throughout. Unlike most western journalists who will seek to minimise their exposure to the frontline, Langan – who was once taken prisoner by the Taliban for three months – choses to linger for hours, even stay overnight, when most prudent reporters would head home.
This is not a film of sustained critical analysis, and at times it appears generous to the Russian position simply by giving its ordinary soldiers and civilians airtime (the blogger is the closest to an official voice in the film). But neither viewers nor broadcasters should completely disregard rarely heard points of view.
When a Russian soldier tells Langan, in an exposed muddy trench near Donetsk, that “my nerves are shot” as drones fly above and that “we are tired of war”, his sentiment is not invalid.
Ukraine’s War: The Other Side airs in the UK on ITV1 at 10.45pm on Monday 19 February 2024
• This article was amended on 22 February 2024 to add the detail that the film commentary mentions the UN documenting cases of unlawful killings and executions of civilians in Bucha.
