Two thousand meters is a little over a mile, roughly the length of the Kentucky Derby, or 25 New York City blocks – a quick drive, a reasonable walk, a span very much within the realm of human comprehension. Which makes the distance in 2000 Meters to Andriivka, Ukrainian director Mstyslav Chernov’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning 20 Days in Mariupol, all the more unbelievable. Here, on this brief wooded strip of land in late 2023, Ukrainian soldiers clawed their way towards the abandoned, one-street town – a supposedly key notch in the Russian supply line – battling Russian artillery fire, snipers and aerial attacks. An advance that would ordinarily take about 10 minutes to run takes several lethal weeks.
In both a feat of film-making and frontline reporting – at the time, Chernov was virtually the only documentarian on the frontline of a conflict rife with Russian propaganda and misinformation – we experience all 2,000 meters to Andriivka as the soldiers do: inch by inch, meter by meter, a senseless barrage of carnage from seemingly everything everywhere all at once, a fever dream of first world war-style trenches and modern drone dystopia. Chernov seamlessly weaves together soldiers’ bodycam footage – harrowing first-person windows into the terror and fog of war – and his own recordings, embedded with Ukraine’s third assault brigade during what turned out to be a largely disappointing counteroffensive. Chernov managed to catch many of the soldiers, mostly boyish twentysomethings who had other plans before Russia’s full-scale invasion, in moments of downtime or reflection, in breaks from the slog. For many, it’s their last record.
If this sounds borderline unwatchable, well, yes, 2000 Meters to Andriivka is almost unspeakably devastating. I have never left a film more psychically and physically sore than after watching these men who, in another timeline, would be attending university or starting careers and families, men the same age as my still-childlike brother – and from spending a full 106 minutes braced for impact. But it is astonishing film-making – as a document of 2020s warfare, as a record of what actually happened, as a memorial to who and what was lost, as a testament to the courage of Ukrainian resistance and the senselessness of this fight in the first place.
I have thought often, in the months since I first watched it – while so much of the international community has accepted some level of permanence to Russia’s invasion – of a fear Chernov voices towards the end of the film: “The longer the war goes on, the less people will care about it.” There is, it seems, some horrible, disconsolate truth to that. But 2000 Meters to Andriivka ensures that, as pyrrhic as the victory at Andriivka may have been and as intractable as the conflict now seems, the specifics will be remembered.
