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.
