Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
Part I of the film. All in Russian. Not yet translated.
by Marina Akhmedova
[REGNUM] At the end of 2024, a four-part documentary film, "At the Edge of the Abyss. The Battle for Mariupol Through the Eyes of an Eyewitness," appeared in Russian online cinemas. The author of the idea and director was Donetsk native Maksim Fadeyev .
The film is a story about the liberation of Mariupol in the spring of 2022, the battles for the city "from the eyes" of the Donbass battalion "Somalia". This is the first documentary about the events in Donbass after the beginning of the SVO, which can be viewed in the largest online cinemas of the country. It is also expected that the film will soon be released in wide release.
Maxim Fadeev told the editor-in-chief of the Regnum news agency Marina Akhmedova what his main goal was, why society needs the harsh truth, which many still brush aside, and also why it is impossible to avoid war, but rather to prepare for it.
— Maxim, you have probably heard more than once in connection with your film that “this cannot be shown to a wide audience.” Do you think such truth about the war is necessary?
— Society really needs the truth about the war. The war came to us after we forgot about it. We say a lot that we remember our Great Victory (the Immortal Regiment, many monuments, lessons in schools…). In fact, we have forgotten what war is.
- Why did we need to remember the war if we had a peaceful sky above our heads for many years?
— The war has been going on for 11 years. For example, it became clear to me on December 1, 2013, that there would be a war. And I started preparing for it, buying tactical gear and video equipment. But I could not imagine that the war would start in my native Donbass.
I also think that one of the main reasons for the war is indifference. When I called my relatives, they asked: "What's going on there?" I said: "War." They said: "What war? Some terrorists are shooting at you." Maybe someone sympathized with us, but no one understood that there was a war. Even if you ask an ordinary person now when the war began, no one will say, because it was as if it did not exist.
— Do you want to say that the more indifferent society is to a war that is not going on somewhere, say, in Africa, but next to your people, the more we bring war upon ourselves?
— Yes. The film is called “On the Edge of the Abyss” because Ukraine was on the edge of the abyss for all eight years before the start of the Second World War, but did nothing to collapse this black hole. Ukraine fell into the abyss. And now Russia is on the edge of the abyss. The longer the war lasts, the greater the danger that the same thing will happen here as in Syria.
What happened in Syria is the enemy's goal. They need an internal explosion in Russia. Now it seems unthinkable, but they are waging an indefinite, unlimited, creative war. The key word is indefinite.
- They are comfortable. They sit there quietly, but here they can do whatever they want.
- Yes. The war in Ukraine is simply one of the tools for creating conditions for everything to collapse in an instant. And a very thin layer separates us from this madness. As long as the people consider the government legitimate, nothing will happen. And what will happen next - I saw that here in Ukraine.
- Why do you say "with us"? It hasn't been with you for a long time.
— When all this started, it was Ukraine. Nobody thought then that Donbass would be Russia. It seemed unthinkable then.
— So many terrible things are happening in Ukraine now, but the Kyiv regime is still not collapsing.
— The Kiev regime will not collapse because it is simply a puppet in their hands to destroy Russia. It will live as a zombie as long as they need it.
— How do you think an ordinary Ukrainian should have lived during these eight years that the war in Donbass was going on, so as not to come even closer to the edge of the abyss?
— In different ways. Let's take the same Mariupol residents. The front line was 20 kilometers from the city, people there were internally mobilized. They could assume that there would be a war. But when Mariupol residents asked why they were shooting at houses when there were urban battles, for me it was something wild.
Or, for example, the scene in the movie when a car with no identification marks and tinted closed windows drives straight into battle. Who do you have to be to bring your family into battle? No matter how scared you were, you had to think about how to mark your car with some signs that you are a civilian.
— People were under terrible stress, they couldn’t understand anything.
- But they lived for eight years near the war, 20 kilometers from the front line.
- She didn't reach them.
— That’s what I’m talking about. That’s why such films are needed. So that people know that during war, civilian lives are worth nothing. Nobody thinks about it. But we see what horror is happening to the people who remain in Syria. People know that there is a word “war”. But they don’t understand that it cancels out all other words: peace, mother, happiness, Motherland.
— In the first part of your film, the word “war” is often heard with the same intonation: “Why are you shooting at houses?” — “War. What did you expect?” This is not just an artistic device. This is something you yourself experienced. This word covers everything and explains everything.
— When the war in Donetsk began in April 2014, we called it a war, but no one called it a war. Ukraine called it "ATO". But for those who found themselves there, it was definitely a war. When a 152-mm self-propelled gun division is operating in your neighborhood, it cannot be called anything else.
This horror has been going on for 10 years. We see how cities are dying. Then it was all called "Operation Joint Forces". But in reality it is called war. It is a global trend. After World War II, peace came to Europe for the first time in many years. And it lasted for more than 70 years.
- This is the world I am talking about. How to live in this world, remembering the war?
— All these years, for the European civilization, war was something ordinary, like rain or snow. My grandmother lived through the First World War, the Civil War, and the Great Patriotic War. She had three wars. When she said, “If only there were no war,” for her these were concrete things, but for us these are just words.
When the nuclear triad appeared, it contained the conflict. But then our enemies came up with a new type of war: information-psychological, which later became cognitive. That is, the war is now waged in the minds of the entire enemy population, when the population itself becomes an instrument of war. Look at how terrorist attacks happen here. Those who committed them themselves do not really know who prompted them to do it.
— And yet: imagine that I am a person who had 70 years of peaceful skies above my head after a terrible war. How should I live?
— We had basic military training and civil defense at school. I knew where our class should evacuate to in case of a nuclear strike. We knew that we should have cotton-gauze bandages. We knew how to use a gas mask, how to apply a tourniquet, and how to fall into a hole during shelling, and not just on the asphalt. We had all that. And then for some reason we decided that we were all so peaceful and that there would never be a war, so we wouldn’t build bomb shelters.
How was it in Mariupol? All the old houses were adapted so that you could hide in them, but all the nine-story buildings were not. In the five-story buildings you could hide in the basement, but not in the nine-story building. There was just a one-and-a-half-meter basement.
— Let's get back to this word. In your film, the military themselves often pronounce war in a familiar way. "Why can't we drive through here? War." And the civilians don't seem to understand this explanation.
— Yes, there was such dissonance. At that time, we had lived in war mode for eight years, and for the people of Mariupol, who lived 20 kilometers from the front, it was something terrible and incomprehensible. I repeat: war cancels the most diverse relationships between people. People do not understand that now their lives are worth nothing.
- How can this be understood? And on what day can this be understood?
- I knew this at the start of the war, because I read a lot about the war. I was interested in it.
— You said that you knew this back in December 2013. Is it because of the Maidan?
— Because of everything. Why did I, a resident of a provincial town, know this, but my comrades from the Party of Regions in Kyiv did not understand this? This is some kind of absurdity. We all understood everything. I am not the only one. I met many militiamen who had already started preparing for war in December.
- This is a normal feature of the human psyche: to close one's eyes to bad things that may happen in the future. I think it's hard to demand that the average person prepare for war when everything around him is peaceful.
— It is not about getting ready to sit in the trenches. It is necessary to establish horizontal connections, look for like-minded people, and engage in physical training. Syria is a very good example: the army laid down its arms, and there were no Minins and Pozharskys in the country. No one took upon themselves the courage to resist. And everything collapsed.
— What did you do before the war that began in 2014?
— All the years before the war I worked in the glamour industry. We published a corporate magazine for one of the chains like Christian Dior. In fact, we served the Donetsk elite.
— Did you then feel any sense of protest about the fact that these things were unreasonably expensive?
— They had dresses for 120 and fur coats for 150 thousand euros. And I did all sorts of creative things for them. Advertising products, a magazine, photo shoots in Italy — we did all that.
— So you did some creative things to find buyers for fur coats for 150,000 euros?
— Yes. We organized all these spaces and parties from a design point of view.
— What did your inner voice say about this?
— I just lived and lived. But a year before the Maidan, I left because I felt contradictions. I then began filming my first documentary about the protests against shale gas extraction in Slavyansk and the surrounding area. We drove through seven districts and saw that the people had practically died and were not ready to resist any longer. People had resigned themselves to the fact that they had been given into slavery.
On the other hand, at that time there was an awareness of resistance. People began to study what was what. It was exactly a year before all the events with Strelkov. And then we encountered the fact that a Maidan was being prepared. When we began to study the technologies by which it was possible to defeat the international corporation Shell, we came to the conclusion that we needed to organize some kind of non-violent protest. We decided to copy-paste the Maidan technology, but only in the opposite direction.
— Did you want to raise a protest?
— We wanted to make a Maidan in reverse, a Maidan of vatniks. This is not the Anti-Maidan that the Party of Regions organized. We wanted to stop Shell with the technology of non-violent creative protest, because other methods would not have stopped them.
That is, at first, hotheads came up with the idea of blowing up the rigs and blocking them. But when we analyzed what happened at other fields in Australia and Iceland, it turned out that the people could do nothing. And then, as it turned out, almost the entire anti-shale movement, except for the Slavic cell, supported the Maidan. And only the Slavic cell sided with Strelkov.
— Why did they split up? They had a common problem before 2013?
— This is also a question of technology, which in Russia was able to partially win because all NGOs were closed. Look at all these organizations, like the “greens.” Sooner or later, they become an instrument of the Maidan. Let’s say you are engaged in protecting the rights of puppies and do not get involved in politics. And then they tell you: “All the problems of puppies in Ukraine are due to Yanukovych. But as soon as we come to Europe, everyone will be happy.” I observed all this from the inside. How it works, how they suppress protests. It is very easy for them to do. And this technology continues to work in Georgia. It is sad to see that people are falling for it once again.
— Maybe you hoped that your films would become a vaccination?
— Yes. I was naive at first. I filmed one of my first reports in Slavyansk, when artillery shelled a psychiatric hospital from which unfortunate patients were being evacuated. I left the shooting location hoping that my report would come out and the war would stop.
Before that, no one believed that artillery was working on us. And I thought: "Finally, I have recorded artillery working on us. That will be enough. Russia will do something, people will come out to protest in Kyiv." All this naivety has long since passed.
But when we were making "At the Edge of the Abyss," we had several ideas. First: to show what war is. Second: to show the boys who grew up in this war. How they fought and how they died.
— And now do you believe that it is within human power to stop the war?
— So far, no one has succeeded. After each war, different types of art emerge. Vereshchagin painted, Tolstoy wrote novels. Perhaps they were able to awaken something in people, but globally, it was just one of the attempts to show what war is.
- So you are no longer an idealist. You understand that if a war is going to happen, nothing can stop it?
- Yes, that's true. But people should at least understand what it is. They should somehow prepare for it. It's already very close. Global war has become a reality for the next 30-40 years.
- You've been at war for so many years that you should feel like a friend. Why did she come to us?
— In war, you constantly think about war. Since May 2014, there hasn’t been a single day that I haven’t thought about it. And the characters in my films think about it. You know, until the one who started it gets drunk, the war will continue. My characters talk about this in the fourth episode: “Money for some, pain for others.” That’s true. Nothing in the world has changed. Yes, I repeat, there was a restraining factor. But they found a tool to bypass this restraining factor. And everything flared up in a new way.
In addition, the state had a monopoly on war. But the example of Syria showed that a new dark Middle Ages was coming. Until we learn to live in this new world and return to God, everything will be like this.
— Do you really think so?
- Yes. Because the basis of the state, when we can live without God, was essentially invented 400 years ago. And now this world has entered an era of decline.
- You said that we need to return to God. So, war, to some extent, comes from God?
— I am not ready to philosophize on this topic. My task is simple — to show people and war. I hope that someone will see this and draw the right conclusions for themselves. Because even generals do not quite understand what is happening there. Sometimes even a battalion commander does not understand what is happening to his boys.
By the way, we have lost the experience of recording war. That is, during the Great Patriotic War, both we and the Nazis considered newsreels to be a priority propaganda tool. The maximum amount of resources and talents were poured into this business. For example, Leni Riefenstahl's cameramen later became military cameramen. And we had the same thing.
Moreover, three types of newsreels were filmed. The first: a newsreel as a film. These are "Battle for Berlin", "Battle for Stalingrad", "Battle for Moscow". "Battle for Moscow" was filmed by 19 best Soviet cameramen. The second: news reports for "Soyuzkinozhurnal". The third: a film chronicle. Simply filming and recording events. This does not exist now.
— And did you make a film chronicle?
— Sergei Belous and I filmed it together using public money. Some TV channels filmed it, but they didn’t film it as a movie. Some film crews, like the film “I’m Going Home,” seemed to film it as if it were for a movie. But these are, again, private initiatives. Previously, the state worked for this. For example, the battles in Budapest were filmed by two front-line film crews of 15-20 people each with a single director’s concept.
There was a battle for Kurakhovo. Before that there were Ugledar and Artemovsk. Then there will be Pokrovsk. How many film crews are there? None.
— Do you think this needs to be seen?
- Of course. Thousands of heroic deeds are performed every day, and we will never know the faces of these guys, nor what they did. Never.
— It just seems to me that such chronicles are terrible footage. Not many people will dare to watch them. Perhaps you already have professional deformation, you have lived in war for too long. And if you catch some Muscovite and show him this, he will fade away for a long time.
- That's the whole point of everything we do. We want to show that war is right around the corner.
- So you want to awaken the viewer? He might get scared and even bury his head in the sand.
— There is no such thing yet. On the contrary. We see people awakening, judging by their feedback and reactions.
- But those who are predisposed to watch it are the ones who watch it.
— Not only that. That’s exactly what we want, for as many people as possible to see it. And when the film came out on platforms, it came out of the Z-party bubble. Everyone started watching it. It now has the highest rating on Kion of all the films there.
They send us their feedback. For example: "You opened my brain, you reprogrammed me. All this time I treated it completely indifferently, tried to throw it out of my life. Didn't notice. And now I understand how wrong I was all these years."
— What in the film created this effect?
— Viewers see that the war lasted all these years. It’s not just the battles for Mariupol that are shown here. There are flashbacks in each episode. We see how the heroes who are fighting in Mariupol fought in 2017. People see this and understand that this is not propaganda. It’s simply impossible to film something like this in a propaganda manner. This is life.
Why is the film so long? Because no art form can tell what war is. You can at least let us feel it a little bit.
There is a scene in the film where our soldiers storm a hospital for four days using howitzers and tanks. Even a plane flew in once. And then it turned out that 120 civilians were sitting in the basement of this hospital, including a little boy. And they sat there for 40 days without light. There were candles in the lamp. I went in there, shone a flashlight, and the boy screamed. I can only imagine what he felt when he sat there for 40 days and then survived four days of assault.
Imagine a coal car crashing next to you. Just one tank shot makes about the same noise. And it lasted four days. And before that, the boy saw his house burn down and his neighbor die. These are the feelings of just one boy. What did the other 120 people feel? It wasn't even included in the film.
- What did you feel when you entered and the boy screamed?
— I wanted to cry. I stopped filming and started to calm him down. I had been through all of this before. I was able to find a common language with him. And I talked to him for 15-20 minutes. Perhaps it saved my life. Because the group I was moving with went ahead and disappeared for some time. They were rescued and found throughout the second episode. One guy died, another was seriously injured. And if I hadn’t stayed with that boy, I would have gone with the “Jaff” group.
— And you and the boy stayed out of humanism?
— I don’t know if it’s humanism or not. I just saw his condition and started telling him: “Calm down, it’s all over now.”
- How old is he?
— Seven or eight. There were different people there. I communicated a lot with the local population. And this is one of the problems of the army. We used to have an institute of political officers. Watch the films about Shchors or Kovpak. There was always an officer next to them who communicated with prisoners and civilians from the liberated areas. Now this is completely lost, there is no one to communicate.
— It seems to me that the DPR people can communicate with civilians.
- They can. And I myself, to some extent, performed the functions of a political officer. I communicated a lot with civilians.
— And what condition were the other 120 people in?
— The same as the boy. When a tank shoots at your house, every shot can be the last. These people survived. And in some other place, the same people, maybe, did not survive. War is such a thing, everything is a matter of chance. In war, there is no black and white. Everything is more dirty and gray.
— How did you film people who died on camera?
- I didn't take pictures of dying people. Most of the guys died later.
— And the civilians? There was an old man without a leg.
— I was just filming.
- And you didn't have the urge to run up to him? Or, when they're shooting, you have no time for that?
— We still look at a military situation from a peacetime perspective, without fully understanding what was happening there. Until the moment you point a camera at someone, everything happens in some unfolding event. Figuratively speaking, you understand whether you can help him or not. And you, too, can be in a state of shock. When they told me that he had been in this state for three days, all my knowledge of tactical medicine seemed to evaporate. I did not understand how it was possible to survive in such a state for three days and what to do with him.
The only thing I blame myself for is that I was in uniform, I could have yelled at the civilians and made them carry him with them. But I couldn't do anything else. I couldn't help him. I didn't have an extra tourniquet with me. So my thoughts were something like, "Sorry, man, but I could end up in your place."
— I guess that’s what everyone thinks in such circumstances?
- Probably. I repeat, I could organize civilians to try to carry him out. The only thing is, I told them where they should go and say: "Tell them that he is lying here, they will come for him."
— Do you know if he was taken?
— The next day he was no longer there. You see, this was not the first man without a leg in such a state. For me, it was not something extraordinary at that moment. After all, I was inside the city at that moment. The fighters were somewhere in the rear or in front. You cannot lag behind them. You were given a small period of time for this independent filming-hunt.
— How did you navigate, how did you find them later?
— I understand roughly where I came from. A Ukrainian tank fired at the house, the house caught fire, I saw civilians running out of the entrance, and I told the guys I was with: "Sanya, I'll go and see what's going on." He replied: "You have five minutes, then we'll leave." I came, filmed, and came back. That is, I showed the civilians the way, risking my own life. The Ukrainians didn't fire at the civilians, but they could have fired at me because I was in a military uniform.
- You say they didn't work on civilians. Is that true?
— They mostly didn't work. If the VSAS guys saw that civilians were running somewhere, what was the point of giving themselves away by opening fire on them? In the place where there was an open space that civilians run across in the film, not long before that the Ukrainians shot a guy from "Somalia", he died.
The most dangerous time for civilians is twilight. When you move somewhere in the dark, you can die. But civilians did not understand the rules of war, that it is better not to go out at twilight or that it is better not to move around Mariupol without documents.
“I think it was so terrible there that it was better not to go out at any time of the day.
— I agree that there were many terrible situations. It is clear that the family needs to be saved. But people made too many fatal mistakes before my eyes.
There is an assault on a building. A typical Khrushchev five-story building. There are VSSU guys in it, we are storming it. A guy comes out of there, goes to our guys and asks for a cigarette. And instead of going to the rear, he returns to the five-story building that is being stormed.
- He probably had someone there.
- There was no one, he was alone there. It looks like he died later. It was complete recklessness. If you are in a building that is being stormed, and you get out of it, why go back in?
- It's psychology. This place seemed safe to him. And he rushed into it.
- I don't know. It's a very stupid, reckless decision.
— There is also a moment in the film when a grandmother cries in the yard because she couldn’t get her friend out of a burning apartment. That is, she left herself, but left her 80-year-old friend behind. She then burned alive.
- They lived in neighboring apartments. The house caught fire, she had no chance to save her grandmother.
- Why didn’t the second grandmother leave?
— If you are limited in movement or paralyzed, you have no chance to escape. It is not shown in the film, but all these people came back. The house was burning. Everyone ran out of there. Then it began to burn less, they came back. And two hours later it was burning very strongly. And they had to save themselves again.
— Isn’t it human to rush to where your native walls are?
— But not to where the assault is going on. Believe me: when a house is being assaulted, a tank can start working on it at any moment. The only salvation is that the front line has passed through you and you can leave. That's the joke. Civilians, when the front line passed through their houses, could easily go to the rear. But they couldn't go in that direction, they weren't allowed through.
- And who told them where the rear was?
- That's obvious.
- Where?
— Ask the military.
— It’s scary to approach the military.
- That guy came and asked for a cigarette. They could have even shot him on the way back. He could have reconnoitred our positions and reported it to the enemy. How do you know if he was a disguised VSSU officer or a civilian? They only let him go because he was an old man.
- Why do you think people become so helpless? I have no doubt that most of the people around me would behave exactly the same way.
— Because they don’t understand what war is. I don’t know why I knew. My colleague and I were running, and his camera had a light on. The enemy was five hundred meters away. He had a white bag facing the enemy. And when D-30 mortars started shooting at us, I fell into a hole, and he fell right on the road.
— Did they hit him?
- No. They hit a girl, she was wounded in the back of the neck. It was my first day at the war.
— What happened to the girl?
— They took me away in an ambulance. I repeat: "Zarnitsa", NVP and the Soviet army gave me some ideas about how to behave in such a situation. And for some reason people decided that this situation would never arise.
You know, I once found myself inside the film "Battalions Ask for Fire", when the characters were defending a village. You are completely mobilized and feel completely normal in this situation.
- You are not a suitable example. You know it yourself, because in 2014 you came to Donetsk yourself, you could have gone to a place where there is no shooting, where you could have lived in peace for another eight years. And then in 2022 you yourself asked to go to "Somalia" and ended up in Mariupol.
— I was there all these years to understand.
- Yes, but it was your voluntary choice. And could you, if you wanted, live all these eight years without a war with expensive fur coats?
— I could, as my colleagues did. But the war came to my home. I had to pack my things and run away?
- Why not?
— This is my Motherland. As my hero says: “You can leave. And your mom and dad? Will you take them with you too?” The most important thing is the Motherland. I always say that the words “Motherland, mom, world” have not become empty words for most people. And when you lose all this and understand that you can no longer find a place like your Motherland, this is the hardest thing.
- And you can’t even find it in your soul?
— Yes. If you can’t go back there, you start dreaming about it. There’s a moment in the film where a fighter looks at enemy territory, and there, behind the waste heaps, is my grandfather’s homeland. I once showed it to a colleague of mine and just burst into tears. I cried for about 30 minutes, because there’s something behind every frame that’s felt stronger than just a picture. Every fighter I spent many years with became my friend.
— Is it difficult to express what is behind the picture in documentary films?
— It’s very difficult. Besides, it was our first film where we used a voiceover (voiceover in the background. — Ed.). Before that, we made all our films without a voiceover, so it’s very difficult to convey the story without a voiceover. And these things behind the picture are very important.
— What would be worse for you: to destroy your homeland on earth or in your soul?
- Both are hard. When she is not on earth, she is not in the soul. Sometimes I watch newsreels from cities where the war has already passed. I can't imagine what the people who lived there feel.
— Is it okay for you to look at the new Mariupol?
— It is morally much easier to be in Mariupol now than in Donetsk. Because life is being restored there. You see how the city is coming to life and how people are smiling.
— Can you forget everything you saw in Mariupol?
- Of course. In fact, it's all very easy. There's a lot of talk about post-traumatic syndrome now. But when you're on the right side and you understand why you did it, it's less pronounced.
— So if you understand that it’s not our fault, it’s easier to accept everything that was on the video?
— Yes. Although, maybe, I failed to explain it in the film. What is Ukraine doing now? It uses several fragments from the film. It cuts off the beginning and the end of the Russian officer’s phrase. Like, he said this and that. But I know what he said off-screen. This is war. If we hadn’t killed them, they would have killed us.
— Do you mean Ukrainian military personnel?
- Yes. The horror is that they changed into civilian clothes and used civilian cars. Because of this, many civilians suffered. Ordinary militiamen, especially mobilized ones, cannot quickly sort them out during a battle or while moving around the city.
— I was in Mariupol in March. It was a difficult experience. I think it is such a tragedy that it is impossible to photograph it. It is like the sky, and you are like a small grain of sand. How did you decide to start carving something out of this block?
— Yes, it is difficult. Hundreds of thousands of people experienced this in Mariupol. What I did was the first attempt to somehow tell about it. Only when I flew over the city in a drone for the first time did I realize the scale of what was happening. When a small assault group of seven people runs into a huge block, where there is complete uncertainty... And at the same time you see how a tank works there, how civilians run away from there and how a lion from the zoo roars. I will remember the sound of Mariupol for the rest of my life.
- Like a roaring lion?
— Not only. It is a cacophony of gunfire and silence. The most terrible thing in war is not the shelling, but the silence after the shelling. Modern directors cannot show this because they do not know it.
Imagine this silence, when everything is switched off. Cars don't drive, factories don't work, refrigerators don't hum, people are hiding. I saw this in Slavyansk and Mariupol. It's a very depressing and stunning thing.
- "War".
— Yes, yes. The lion roars. The pilot of a downed Russian plane descends by parachute, the enemy fires at him, he falls on enemy territory. And all this is beyond comprehension — in the 21st century, an entire city is burning.
- And for what? So that someone could wear these fur coats?
- No, for Mariupol to become Russian.
- It's for us. But it's unlikely that we would unleash such a tragedy just so that he would become Russian.
— We later filmed another movie about the restoration of Mariupol. There we had a main character: a photographer who lived through all of this in Mariupol itself. And he had these words: “We were ready to pay even greater sacrifices, if only Mariupol would become Russian.”
I can say the same about myself. Why did people take up arms? Why did I take up a camera? Because this is a war for the soul of the people and for the consciousness of the people. Some have come to terms with the fact that they are no longer Russian and now hate Russia. And some did not want to come to terms with the fact that Zhukov and Vatutin are not our heroes. And those who did not come to terms with it took up arms.
— But the people who did not accept this, took up arms and began to fight for the soul of the people, could not explain this by saying that they were fighting for the soul of the people. They hardly realized that the people even have a soul.
— No, many felt it. In 2014, it was easy for me to film in Slavyansk, because the majority of people who were there could explain it well in words.
— They are no more?
— Some quit in 2014–2016. But the majority, unfortunately, did not. They died.
— Do you believe that people have a soul?
- Of course. Otherwise there would be no states.
— It would probably be stupid to approach a documentary filmmaker with such questions. But could you describe in words the soul of the Russian people?
- Well, it's very hard. Words can't describe it.
- What would you show then as a picture if you absolutely had to show it?
— From 2014 to 2022, I showed the soul of the Donetsk people.
- Isn't this our common soul?
— It’s common, but different. Remember Pyotr Lopakhin from the film “They Fought for Their Country”? He was a miner from Donbass. He cooked crayfish and flirted with women. Dashing, reckless, cold-blooded. Such guys gave their lives without realizing it. I remember the first shock of Russian volunteers who met Donetsk boys — how easily they died.
“They Fought for Their Country” is an excellent Russian film about WWII.
— This has always amazed me too since 2014. It’s probably not easy after all. They just couldn’t put it into words.
— Yes. It’s not easy. But that’s who they are. And I remember many who have already died. For example, Shrek. He’s standing there in shorts, flip-flops, and with a machine gun: “Oh, if only they’d given us tanks, we’d have reached London.” I take a picture of him, and a year later, on May 9, I see a girl walking with four children and carrying his portrait.
- And what did you feel when you saw it?
- Pain, of course. These are ordinary bright guys who were called terrorists. This was the dehumanization of the residents of Donbass.
- You said that the Donetsk guys are bright. It's very difficult to explain.
— There are all sorts of types in war. But mostly they are ordinary Donetsk boys. They are very different from Muscovites and residents of other Russian regions, because production in Donbass is associated with large teams and risks to life. From childhood they know what death is. A child goes to his grandmother's cemetery and sees 120 identical graves, because people died on the same day. Maybe he knew someone personally. Or they were his friends' parents.
The film shows three friends - machine gunners from Lidievka (a settlement near a mine in Donetsk - editor's note): Babai, Lyova and Kozyr. This trio controlled their entire Lidievka. They could give anyone a good whack on the head. It's like Pyotr Lopakhin. Imagine that your entire unit consists of Pyotr Lopakhins with all their jokes and anecdotes.
— And they played a critical role in 2022, when the rest of the army was not ready.
— Despite the fact that they looked like homeless people (after 40 days of fighting, all their clothes burned, they put on what they found, and only then — something captured), they had eight years of war experience. And the Russian units were a peacetime army. Yes, they had equipment and tanks. But in Mariupol, it was Somalia that found itself half-encircled, because they always broke through the defense line, and then Russian units entered through them. They passed Mariupol four times.
There was a moment when three other units, including the Marines, couldn't get past them. But Roma Vorobyov's assault groups got past them on foot because they didn't care about death.
— And does it happen that it can lead to death anyway?
- Maybe. I also experienced this after 60 days of assault.
— Is it fatigue or pain?
— It is physical and psychological exhaustion. Imagine 60 days of hiking at zero degrees. And here are 60 days of assault. It is very hard to bear. There were cases when a fighter was so tired that he could not climb through a window or over a railing. He wanted it to end as quickly as possible.
— Even if it ends with his death?
- You just start acting recklessly.
— And in those days, did you ever say to yourself: “Why did I come here, I’m not even a military man?”
— I didn’t have that. I’m the same as them. I just walked behind them with a camera. I remember a sailor asked me the same question in the old terminal: “We’re going there, they can blow us up there.” I said: “You’re going too. Only you’re walking with a machine gun, and I’m doing more important things. I’m filming this. This is more important than killing some “cyborg.”
That's why I was the only one who was at the storming of the old and new terminals of Donetsk airport. The first one who was on the runway. And the only one who was in Maryinka in the summer of 2015, when it was stormed for the first time.
- Why are you the same as them?
— I have two best friends. One joined the militia, the other joined, then left. How are they different from me? Nothing. I am an ordinary Soviet person.
— Why Soviet?
— Donbass was the most Soviet region of the USSR. Multinational. I was recently asked: "Are you Russian or Ukrainian?" Nobody knew about it here. To my shame, I only learned about the nationality "Jew" when I was 13. I had never even heard this word before. It didn't matter there.
When I was filming the militias, I saw a Jew and an Azerbaijani running around with an RPG. In Donbass, all nationalities melted down. Donbass essentially arose in the Soviet Union. We were proud of the achievements of the USSR: Buran, the Kremlin stars, the Ostankino TV tower, steel mills. Factories where mercury or sulfuric acid was made, the Komsomolets Donbassa mine for 10,000 people. This is hard physical and intellectual labor.
- But you didn't work with all this. You worked with fur coats. Sorry for picking on them.
- No, I worked with all of that too. Fur coats are just part of my career. I was supposed to work at a nuclear power plant as assigned. My colleagues were building nuclear power plants all over the USSR. But I didn't go there after the army, because the Union had already collapsed.
— I latched onto fur coats because money is made in war. And in Mariupol I saw civilians who were lying every five meters, wrapped in sheets. But at the other end, those who earn money buy luxury items for themselves with this money and can’t get drunk. How can you reconcile this in one head?
- Maybe if one of them sees my film, they will think about something.
— Do you think they can think about it and give up something?
- No, of course not. A capitalist with 300% profit doesn't think about anything anymore. But maybe their children will see something. And war is war. We need to come to terms with it and understand how to live in war.
- You speak as if something worse awaits us.
— I wouldn’t like it, but it’s quite possible. Judging by the information I receive from open sources, war will become our reality. That’s why this film was made. It’s already our reality. The longer it lasts, the worse the situation we find ourselves in.
— So the viewer should understand that the war in Donbass did not start in 2022?
— That’s right: remember the war and know that it didn’t start in 2022. The viewer clearly sees this in the film and understands that this is the truth, not propaganda.
— Because you showed everything as it is?
— It is impossible to show everything as it is. There is some kind of internal censorship. What I am talking about in the film is a glamorous version of war. But even it shocks people who have no idea what war is. Reality is even more terrible and complicated.
I also want to say that Ukraine is mobilizing now, and we are sort of demobilizing ourselves. That's the horror. We say there is no war, and we are removing it.
We simply analyzed the enemy's activity in the information field due to our occupation. Let's take streaming platforms. Our film is the first war film on Russian streaming platforms. And Ukrainian streaming platforms are filming original content about the war.
— I watched this content — it is not uplifting. The devil is in this content.
- But it is packaged very beautifully.
— You said that your film is appreciated because it is not propaganda. There is really no valor there, that our brave soldiers go to defend and liberate the city. But you still have the feeling that you touched the light in the souls of the people about whom it was filmed. And in Ukrainian content, everything is prompt and beautiful. Even women fight there. It looks like an American action movie. But after watching it, you have the feeling that you opened the door to hell and saw the devils.
— I can’t watch them because they are of poor quality. But they exist. Netflix has four films about the war in Ukraine, while our platforms have none. What’s the difference? Why is it interesting for American viewers to watch films about the war in Ukraine? Even the film about Azov (a terrorist organization banned in Russia) “We Were Recruits” made it there.
— They understand it, it’s consumerism.
- This is a separate issue. And we don't have films, they are not being made. They are being made in Ukraine, they are sponsored by top IT companies, banks. Our banks do not sponsor our documentaries about our Russian soldiers. This is a minus for them.
- How can I remove it? If a person hasn't been through a war like you, he can vulgarize everything.
— I watched one report from Avdeevka, and I wanted to hit our war correspondent on the head so much. He asked such stupid questions... He doesn't understand at all what the people who stayed there went through. It's painful.
I could establish relationships with the locals who live in the frontline regions. But the correspondents who come from here are saturated with propaganda that is shown on our television, and do not always understand the situation in the liberated regions.
— Do you think that if our banks or other sponsors gave money, we would have decent films?
— I already said that it was filmed during the Great Patriotic War. Then television came along and killed the cohort of people who could tell stories with a picture without a war correspondent. That is, they used to show everything. A talking head didn’t come out and say “so many Tigers were shot down there.”
— Is it worth comparing the SVO with the Great Patriotic War? After all, everyone lived for the war then. I don’t believe that a director who doesn’t live for the war can make a worthwhile film about the war.
- I agree. This is the horror of what is happening, that in 1941 almost every citizen of the country knew who the enemy was and what needed to be done to win. Now the situation is worse than in 1941. The enemy has already captured Kharkov, Nikolaev, Odessa and part of the Kursk region, and we are all relaxed, as if nothing is happening. The enemy's goal is to destroy Russia.
— Am I right in coming to the conclusion that there will be worthy films and books about the war if people live in the reality we find ourselves in?
— Yes. When the Simonovs and VGIK cameramen go to Donbass. They will be able to convey this to other people. For now, we seem to be in control: “there is no war, it’s the SVO.” But you just have to go to streaming platforms and see what kind of films are being made. What does the state spend money on? All sorts of films about pimps and girls of easy virtue. Although if we’ve been making “Bastards” for 30 years, why are we surprised by this situation?
It's scary, really. On the other side, children are ready to kill. They are taught to assemble and control drones. And our children say: "This is not our war, our politicians started it, let them finish it, we are very peaceful people, we want to live in peace." That is, they do not understand that they are preparing to kill them and are doing everything for this, right?
I have seen situations where mobilized guys did not know how to cook their own food and arrange a place to sleep. You must defend your right to live in peace.
— Was there a particularly difficult moment in Mariupol when you, like that lion, wanted to scream?
— When grandmothers cry near a burning house. And especially children.
- I hope you didn't see the child's death or his dead body?
— I haven’t seen any. But I’ve seen a lot of men with one leg. And there was a terrible story in the hospital. There was an artillery barrage, and after it, someone was shouting, “Help, help,” but it was impossible to help. You’re inside a building and can’t get out.
— What did you feel?
— Pain. Since 2014, I have been in situations where you help one person, but cannot help the other. A woman is lying there. She has five penetrating wounds and multiple blast injuries. And three healthy men are walking around her and asking: “Maybe you should get some water?” I was actually the same in 2014. I don’t know what to do with her. Let her lie there, they’ll come soon…
— Have you changed since Mariupol?
— To some extent, yes. And the guys who were there. The same Roma Vorobey said: “Why were we so desperate? We thought that Mariupol would not let us out alive. We thought then that Mariupol was hell.” And then I saw him a year later, and he said: “Mariupol was an easy walk compared to what the war is like now.”
— Because of the drones?
— Not only that. It was 2023. Drones, shells, artillery. It seemed like fighting had become harder. And the best people, who were easier to command than the "mobiles," left.
— I will return to the topic of the soul of the country and the people. If you were given a lot of money from some bank and asked to make a film about the soul of the country, what would you show?
— There are a lot of heroes. We wanted to make a film about this even before the SVO, to figure it out. That’s why I don’t know the answer yet. Although I’ve already visited many regions of Russia. I would probably make a film about this.
— Why not about the war?
— It is precisely in war that this is best revealed. But there are many misconceptions here too. For example, in Mariupol, it was more interesting for me to film Donetsk boys than Russians, because the Russians had picked up propaganda on TV and spoke in memorized phrases, not understanding the full depth.
— Do they understand now?
— They understand. They have been fighting for three years now. But there are problems here too. One of the commanders recently wrote to me: “I conduct training with the personnel, showed your film. So many of them have not even heard of the battles in Mariupol.” They do not know anything about the Donetsk airport, Givi and Motorola. They just lived, and then suddenly decided to sign a contract. What can I say about them… I was amazed that even the Rostov security forces knew nothing about “Motor”, although they lived on the border with the DPR.
— It turns out that no matter how much you run away from war, it will come for you?
- Of course. If you are not interested in politics, politics will be interested in you. And in the modern world there will be more wars. In order to survive, they must seize our resources, including human ones. But victory will be ours in any case. We simply have no other choice.
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[NYPOST] Smartphones, computers and other electronics will be exempt from President Trump's sweeping reciprocal tariffs, the administration announced.
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