Soldiers fighting on Ukraine’s front lines see no change on the battlefield while peace talks continue back and forth between Kyiv, the Kremlin and the US, a Ukrainian filmmaker has said.
Mstyslav Chernov, the Academy Award-winning director of 20 Days in Mariupol, gave The Independent an insight into morale on the frontline after the limited release of his latest documentary, 2000 Meters to Andriivka, put him straight on the battlefield with Ukraine’s armed forces.
It comes as Ukrainian officials continue to negotiate peace terms after the US president Donald Trump put forward a deal to end the war which critics have described as being pro-Russian.
While US officials reopened dialogue with the Kremlin in February, Mr Chernov explained that global diplomacy has meant very little to those fighting for their life and homeland.
“All these conversations, they don't get to the front line, to be clear,” he says. “There's very little interest [in] all of the political and geopolitical conversations that are happening around the world. There's very little trust in words. None of the words that were spoken since February 2025, all the big words, none of [them] have translated into actions that actually changed something on the battlefield. So there is a lot of scepticism around it.”
He continues: “What the soldiers see is if they're right now still fighting, they're going to get killed. It's very simple. You have an enemy. We have someone who's attacking you, and if you put your gun down, you're dead.”
Mr Chernov himself remains sceptical that the Russian president Vladimir Putin will accept peace terms, as he observes the waning support for Ukraine from the Trump administration: “I just don't see Russia, which is currently in a position that they feel that they are winning on the battlefield, agreeing to any peace terms.
“They're bigger than Ukraine, and they see that the US is not supporting Ukraine. And so, we're not supporting Ukraine enough – they feel emboldened. Because of that, they will never stop, because why would they? They are profiting from this war. And their population is profiting from this war.”
Mr Chernov’s latest documentary recorded Ukraine’s perilous attempts to recapture the village of Andriivka from Russian forces in 2023, weaving together original footage and intense army bodycam video of a battle in a barren wasteland. Mr Trump’s latest peace deal would involve Ukraine ceding Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk to Russia. Mr Chernov reflected on Russia’s attempts to claim more territory – and on Mariupol, where his first Oscar-winning documentary was set.
He says: “We think a lot about what is happening to occupied territories right now as Russia demands to occupy more and more cities. They demand that Ukraine should surrender Sloviansk and Kupiansk and Kostiantynivka and Pokrovsk [...] In order to even start thinking about it. We should remember what happened to Mariupol’s people, what happened to Izium, what happened to Kherson. What happened is thousands of children were taken away and re-educated and right now are being taught how to fight against Ukraine.”
Mr Chernov’s reflections come two weeks after Ukraine’s government revealed that Russia has forcibly mobilised more than 46,000 people from the occupied territories to fight against their fellow countrymen.
“What we'll see in those occupied territories is what any colonial empire does,” he adds. “They occupy their outskirts. They enslave, they torture, they suppress people in the country they invaded, and they send them to fight for it. It's a perpetual imperialistic motion that we know was always happening for Russia.”
He issued a stark warning about what might happen if Ukraine were forced to cede further territory, echoing what happened during the illegal occupation of Bucha for close to a month in the early stages of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Ukrainian officials reported that 458 bodies were recovered after the town was liberated, including nine children under the age of 18.
“Give away another city, and there will be more of them. And there will be more tortures, there will be more forests with unmarked graves like the one in Izium, of people who have been killed by occupation. There will be more Buchas. Sloviansk is a very pro-Ukrainian city. If they just get in there without a fight, if they suddenly occupy it, we'll have Bucha again but on a bigger scale.”
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