Prior to the current all-out Russian/Ukrainian war of 2022 there were various documentaries about the frozen conflict in the Donbass. The two better known are perhaps Donbass (2018, Sergey Loznitsa) and The Earth is Blue as an Orange (2020, Iryna Tsilyk). Both were financed by the Ukraine and various European countries, so we expect (and get) a view of the conflict slanted in favor of the Ukraine, although both films manage to keep a balance and remind us that much of what we see in these and other war documentaries is actually staged or reenacted.
The root of the conflict was the Maidan revolution, openly organized and supported by the US, the European Union and NATO. It was followed by scandalously rigged elections where inconvenient candidates and parties were proscribed. The Donbass seceded de facto from the Ukraine although agreed to rejoin if given a degree of autonomy that included the free use of Russian, spoken by most of the population. President Petro Poroshenko responded with an "antiterrorist operation" that aimed at reincorporation of the Donbass by military force. This documentary opens with a bloodcurdling fire-and-brimstone speech by Poroshenko where, among other things, he threatens that "our children will go to school, theirs will go to the caves". The operation was defeated in 2014 by the Donbass militia with Russian assistance. The repulse dealt a humiliating blow to the Ukrainian Army, although some territory was taken from the rebels. Two more attempts, encouraged by and supported with weapons by the US and its vassals equally failed. And ever since 2014 the Ukrainan Army has resorted to random shelling of Donbass towns with no military objectives and mostly civilian casualties. The frozen conflict finally evolved to an all-out war in 2022 after massed units of the Ukrainian Army concentrated near the limits of the Donbass.
French director Anne-Laure Bonnet (who is also in charge the excellent cinematography) has filmed this documentary in the purest way possible. We only see what is there, there are no props, reenactments or staging, and we only hear what the victims of the war tell us. There is no preaching and the final conclusion, if any, is left to us. The film provides (or rather facilitates) a view of the Donbass conflict that runs counter to almost everything the mainstream media parrot, and it is the more valuable because of this.
