KUPYANSK – “Stop the car, put on body armour.” Zak, an ex-British Para and machine gunner, directs us towards a wrecked petrol station. Explosions thunder in the near distance as we don helmets and flak jackets. We drive on into Kupyansk; a frontline town nestled in a valley in north-east Ukraine, a hotspot in the war against Russia.
I’m here to make a BBC film about the front lines through the eyes of Ukrainian fighters. The front line between Russia and Ukraine stretches 932 miles and cameras rarely get to see the scale and ferocity of the fighting up close.
Kupyansk looks like a set from a dystopian blockbuster film. Russian and Ukrainian artillery positions exchange fire in the sky above the houses and shops. We pass a smashed school, an apartment block with the facade obliterated, a wrecked government building. There are some signs of life; a few babushkas mill in and out of a post office, a German shepherd accompanies a man with one leg at the central crossroad, a man cooks kebab skewers on a charcoal grill outside an empty restaurant.
Before I left London, several Ukrainian brigades had invited me to film with them, to show the reality of their daily struggle against the Russians on a front line where news crews rarely go. By the time I arrived, they’d been so devastated this was impossible. I’d been sent videos of one group assaulting positions in the summer; all but one of those men were dead. A staggering 85 per cent of fighters in the brigades had been seriously wounded or killed.
Russia’s full-scale invasion had been under way for almost two years when I arrived, and it continues to influence global geopolitics – from elections to the price of gas. “How can you be tired of war when you’re not the ones fighting it?” a soldier called Eugen asks when we discuss the West’s “war fatigue”.
In Kupyansk, two soldiers meet us: Sergey and Commander Dmytro. We follow their jeep on to a railway track that has become a makeshift road, driving past concrete checkpoints. We approach a bridge that’s been blown up to prevent Russian advances, with a temporary pontoon bridge built to help cross the frozen river.
We come to a suburban family house. Grad rocket munitions land close by, the sound of shelling mere background noise, the everyday reality for people here. Commander Dmytro leads me inside. It’s boiling hot. Machine guns line the walls. Soldiers wander about, cleaning their weapons, cooking soup, resting in sleeping bags on the floor.
Commander Dmytro shows me a live drone feed that relays images of a nearby forest and explains the situation. The Russians want to take control of a railway line that cuts through the forest, to use it as a resupply route in their intended advance towards Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second biggest city. Commander Dmytro and his men are here to stop the Russians.
This is the Berlingo Battalion: their mission will become the focus of our BBC documentary Ukraine: Enemy in the Woods.
I visit the group’s command centre, a basement in a wrecked building. From here, soldiers deploy in three-day stints to the forest where they operate from freezing foxholes, under constant artillery fire, fending off Russian assaults. Bunkers are swiftly built and provide minimal protection from Russian fire. They return filthy, limbs filled with frostbite.
At the house, Natalia, a 27-year-old from Kyiv with a Kalashnikov, cares for returning soldiers. She laughs when I ask about the drugs she’s administering – “just painkillers, there’s not a whole lot else”. Natalia was a veterinarian before the war who specialised in treating dogs. The army dismissed her initial attempt to join. As the war rolled on, they signed her up as a combat medic. Natalia sleeps in a basement prone to flooding, close to the front line. She’s the only woman in the Company.
The soldiers here are either very young, 19 to 20 years old, or considerably older at 40 to 50. Many fighting age men have been killed or wounded, hollowing out the median-age range of soldiers who’d usually be expected to fill the core infantry (around 22 to 35 years old).
Ukraine’s military is desperate for manpower and the draft has become a sensitive issue for President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government, which is wrestling with lowering mobilisation age from 27 to 25. Many Ukrainians who refused to join have left the country, or simply don’t want to die defending a frozen trench. This division has created friction.
“Here we have a completely different reality. You meet up with your friends, and you have nothing to talk about. They are not interested in listening to some of my stories. I’m not interested in hearing about their new phone or new car,” Natalia explains.
These soldiers were civilians before the war; bricklayers, steelworkers, students, a painter-decorator with dreams of becoming a lorry driver. They’ve become incredibly effective fast, but Russian “meat wave” assaults (sustained attacks undertaken with little regard for the death toll), and the sheer numbers of troops Vladimir Putin is willing to sacrifice, make fighting a terrifying prospect. “If the Russians win, they will kill us for being soldiers, or put us in concentration camps, so we have to keep fighting,” Eugen tells me.
Commander Dmytro believes that if Russia isn’t stopped, his fight in the forest will move to the border of Poland, a Nato country, from where war will escalate exponentially. “If we don’t fight the Russians here they will continue on to your land,” he says.
I spend the following weeks filming and arming the soldiers with means to film themselves. We record hours of action using hi-resolution POV helmet cameras, combined with intimate observational filming and interviews that see fighters reflect emotionally on the war. I examine one video that our lead character, Vovan, has recorded.
In it, he leaves his bunker in search of two missing comrades. He comes across scores of Russian bodies in the snow, then approaches a bunker to find out what’s happened to his friends. It’s a bloody, distressing scene, but it’s the visceral reality we’re here to capture. As Vovan arrives back at base glassy-eyed, chain-smoking, he reflects: “It would be great if I could take a pill to erase my memories.”
Ukraine: Enemy in the Woods will be on BBC Two at 9pm on Monday 25 March, and on iPlayer