Meduza’s daily newsletter: Tuesday, September 10, 2024 A hard look at the controversial film ‘Russians at War,’ St. Petersburg voter fraud, and the war’s impact on life-expectancy gender gaps

A movie on the festival circuit forces Western audiences to confront Russian propaganda

A new documentary screened at last week’s Venice International Film Festival has sparked a debate about humanizing Russian soldiers and raised questions about the director’s motives. Critics say Anastasia Trofimova’s Russians at War is a work of propaganda that ignores Russian war crimes and focuses on volunteer fighters and contract soldiers to the exclusion of draftees and violent criminals recruited from prison. In years past, Trofimova has collaborated with the Kremlin propaganda outlet Russia Today on several documentaries about armed conflicts in the Middle East and Africa. At the same time, she’s been a fixer, interpreter, and producer for Western news organizations like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. To make Russians at War, Trofimova secured 340,000 Canadian dollars (about 250,000 USD) in support from the Canada Media Fund. Her producers include Cornelia Principe, who worked on the Oscar-nominated Canadian documentary film To Kill a Tiger.

What’s so special about this movie?

Trofimova’s motion picture is one of few documentaries depicting a Russian perspective on the war in Ukraine that’s gained traction in the West. Russian censorship since the February 2022 invasion has made it virtually impossible for independent journalists (both foreign and domestic) to report from the Russian side of the war. (Ukrainian censorship has effectively blocked Russian journalists from frontline access, but international outlets can still send reporters into combat zones.) As a result, most information available about conditions inside the Russian military and in occupied Ukraine comes from news outlets that cooperate with the Defense Ministry (like the newspaper Kommersant) and bloggers embedded with front-line soldiers. (Meduza’s Signal newsletter recently addressed the term used to describe these latter writers — “war correspondents” — and explained that the free press typically surrounds it with scare quotes to discourage heroic connotations.)

Why do critics say Russians at War is propaganda?

Trofimova herself admitted in a recent interview that her film’s source sample “is not ideal.” The movie doesn’t feature a single anti-invasion Ukrainian. Instead, viewers get a main protagonist from Donetsk fighting on Russia’s side and a scene where an elderly woman in the Donbas receives Russian humanitarian aid and talks about how she fears Ukrainian troops. The people living in occupied Ukraine who do not welcome Russian invaders either refused to speak to her or had already fled the area, said Trofimova.

Film critic Anton Dolin told Meduza that Trofimova’s documentary likely appealed to the Venice Festival’s organizers because all her characters “curse the war and want peace,” and the movie offers an overall message that resonates with “European humanists” who are “unlikely to delve into the nuances.” Dolin said most of the European journalists who saw Trofimova’s film in Venice described it privately as “peace-promoting and honest.” “I am sure the selection committee came to the same conclusion,” he said.

Documentarian Vitaly Mansky told TV Rain that Russians at War is a “professional” and “very important” propaganda piece that he compares to work by Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. He said it would be “idiocy” to accept Trofimova’s claim that she managed to film on Russia’s frontlines for seven months without the Defense Ministry’s permission. (Mansky said he tried previously to hire someone to record footage on Russia’s side of the front, but the Russian authorities immediately arrested his cameraman.)

Trofimova insists that she witnessed no war crimes herself and “hid nothing from the audience,” but Ukrainian officials have denounced her film and Western organizations’ support for it. The charity platform United24 (an initiative by the Zelensky administration) says Trofimova “overlooked” the realities faced by the Ukrainians living in the regions she visited. (The group has also challenged the legality of her very presence in Ukraine’s occupied territories.) President Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, argued in a Telegram post that there’s no place in “the civilized world” for work by Trofimova and “certain other figures of Russian culture.” In Canada, Ukrainian diplomat Oleh Nikolenko unsuccessfully lobbied the 49th annual Toronto International Film Festival to cancel its screenings of Russians at War.

The Ukrainian filmmakers behind Songs of Slow Burning Earth, which also screened at the Venice Festival, say Trofimova’s documentary evokes “pity, sadness, and emotion” for Russian soldiers without showing the consequences of their violence against Ukrainians. “[M]issiles are striking Ukrainian cities. The buttons are pushed by ordinary Russians. Are their crimes any less significant simply because they claim to be unaware of why they are involved in this war?” asked producer Darya Bassel.

How Anastasia Trofimova explains her film and defends her work

Trofimova says Russians at War aims to show that Russian soldiers “are people, too,” and that they often question the necessity of the very war they are waging. Rejecting the humanization of Russian combatants is tantamount to dehumanizing these soldiers, she reasons, comparing it to the Rwandan radio broadcasts that helped incite the inciting the 1994 genocide. The filmmaker describes her own views as pro-peace, though she says “choosing a side” in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is ultimately a pro-war position.

On March 1, 2022, mere days into Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, Trofimova wrote on Facebook that Putin had inflicted more “global and absolute harm” on Russia and its people than any leader in the nation’s long history. “Russia is neither Putin nor that tiny group of sycophants from Rublyovka [a prestigious residential area outside Moscow] who have taken the country hostage,” she wrote, adding the hashtags: #NoToWar, #PutinIsNotMyPresident, #ImpeacePutin, and #NoWarInUkraine. In the following months, Trofimova also shared news stories about attacks on the independent media and free speech.

How plausible is Trofimova’s story?

Though Trofimova has released previous films through RT Documentary, it’s unlikely that she required Moscow’s permission to chronicle the conflicts in Iraq and Syria (where she worked with Kurdish field commanders who are more dependent on the U.S. military than on the Russian Armed Forces) or in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (where Russian military personnel are absent). But she still accepted RT’s money.

Throughout the invasion of Ukraine, informal ties between civilians and the Russian military have been widespread. Like in the First Chechen War in the mid-1990s, a decentralized infrastructure has emerged to provide Russia’s Armed Forces with additional supplies, “informational content,” and more. For example, “war correspondents” receive exclusive footage from units in exchange for fundraising help to buy drones and electronic warfare equipment. Naturally, these civilian allies must be trusted partners, and past work experience with the state media — like Trofimova’s collaboration with RT — is especially advantageous.

Anastasia Trofimova says she managed to film in the Donbas by traveling there with a soldier she met in the Moscow subway and then selling his officers on the notion that she was performing the same documentary work of embedded correspondents in World War II. “Let me think about it. You just stay quiet for now and don’t draw any attention,” a brigade commander reportedly told her. “He didn’t exactly give permission, but he didn’t forbid it either,” Trofimova explains. At other times while filming, she said she accompanied soldiers to the frontlines without the brigade commander’s consent.

Trofimova says she redacted the “geographical identification points” from her film, but indirect signs still present in her footage made it possible for Meduza to conclude that she traveled with one of the battalions of the 57th Brigade of the 5th Combined Arms Army of the Eastern Military District, moving from Russia’s Rostov region through occupied Luhansk before ending up in a small town outside of Bakhmut (where several of her film’s main characters were injured or killed). Meduza is not aware of any specific allegations of war crimes against this brigade. It’s unclear if Trofimova investigated the matter herself, though there is a moment in the film where she asks a soldier if he believes that the Russian military has committed atrocities in Ukraine. (The soldier says no.)

Trofimova no longer resides in Russia, though she said she would like to work there again, admitting that it “sounds naive.” Today, she is waiting to see how the Russian authorities react to her film and is particularly worried that the Defense Ministry might punish the soldiers who invited her along for the ride. Trofimova says she repeatedly asked the men if they were willing to be filmed, to which they allegedly replied: “They won’t send us any further than the trenches.”

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