There’s a part of me that’s always preferred The Iliad to The Odyssey. It’s less to do with a point of popularity, and more that I received a sweeping picture of one through cultural osmosis while a completely deceptive image of the other before I’d read either. The Odyssey is The Odyssey and The Iliad is…not the Trojan War; it is a glimpse of the pointlessness of war.
Virgil and Hollywood have painted a definitive portrait of the Achaean Greek invasion of Troy, the ensuing siege, and the legendary horse that the Greeks plant as a feint to get their troops inside the enemy walls. The Iliad isn’t really about any of those narratively, and doesn’t contain that most famous sequence of the war at all. Instead it starts with “the rage of Achilles” and ends with the funeral for “Hector, tamer of horses.” The Iliad is set entirely mid-war, and isn’t a story of glory but an epic poem detailing violence begetting violence, with the only reprieve being a stand-still between both forces so that they can briefly lay their dead to rest before the killing resumes. In the broader, mostly lost Homeric cycle, The Iliad would likely seem more purposefully interstitial, but when it stands alone in literary history as it does, it reads as purely polemical: war doesn’t achieve, it only destroys.
2000 Meters to Andriivka is a 2025 documentary made by Ukrainian filmmaker and war correspondent Mstyslav Chernov, constructed of footage he shot and images collected from helmet cameras in the battle to retake Bakhmut during the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive. The film opens with a 10-minute, largely unbroken sequence as a squad of soldiers jumping out of their trenches in an attempt to retreat from their mortar-pounded position on a small strip of burnt-out forest. They’re almost extracted by an APC, until it gets stuck in the mud. They jump back out into a hellish wasteland. Rain clouds cover blood-soaked brown dirt as they try to pull away the wounded by hand. They fall back into small trenches. The soldier looks up, his helmet camera looks up, as smoke comes and covers the silhouetted broken trees on top of him.
Chernov cuts from here to a drone shot of the section the Russian and Ukrainian forces are desperately fighting over: a thin strip of forest between two massive fields, both now riddled with landmines, making the 2000-meter strip of bombed-out woods the only passable route to Andriivka, a tiny, otherwise unnoteworthy hamlet that’ll be needed to launch an offense to retake Bakhmut, which itself was the sight of some of the heaviest urban combat of the war and was considered something of a modern Stalingrad because of the length and brutality of the fighting. Chernov will follow soldiers as they advance meter by meter, usually only two at a time, to try to break the Russian frontline.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began almost four years ago, is a nationalist conflict that’s decimated both countries’ populations of fighting-age men in ways not seen since WW2. Like the “Great Patriotic War,” both conflicts began as ideological ones, with the former case being the expanding threat of Nazi fascism—which had genocidal intent for Eastern Europe through Lebensraum—while the this 21st century fight has to do with Ukraine’s pro-NATO alignment ever since Euromaidan in 2014. Russia claimed that their full-scale invasion of Ukraine was a “special military operation” meant to de-Nazify the current Ukrainian state (although Russia had been de facto at war with Ukraine since they annexed Crimea in 2014 and had their own soldiers and proxies fighting in breakaway regions like Donetsk).
The scale of the war was unprecedented in post-Cold War Europe, even though it’s reflexive of the Balkanization of the Eastern Bloc ever since the fall of communism, like the various Yugoslav wars or Azerbaijan's ethnic cleaning of Artsakh—the optimism of the Soviet era (mandated or not) was crushed by neoliberal doctrine as the public sector got looted to oligarchs and gangsters, and all that was left ideologically was a militarism that manifested in new forms of ultranationalism.
In Russia this manifested, most starkly, in Aleksandr Dugin’s “eurasianism,” a neo-fascist form ideology which purports a specifically Russo-dominated sphere of influence across its the former imperial borders and itself constitutes a whole civilization separate from their European or Asian counterparts. On the Ukrainian side, the revived nationalism is the old Nazism, a revival of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, or OUN, a group which would ultimately align with the Nazis in fighting the Soviets and collaborate in Nazi atrocities, including the Holocaust. Ukraine has a Nazi problem, but not one that the Russian government seeks to solve, as they don’t seem too concerned with their own fascist underpinnings. But as both sides continue to slaughter each other, they only dig their heels in further and push further to the ultra-right. Their mutual hatred deepens the more pointless the conflict becomes.
Part of what makes Chernov’s documentary work so well is how restrained he is in editorializing. There’s the immediate shock to the footage on display—it’s terrifying seeing suicide drones from a first-person perspective, or soldiers shooting each other from mere feet away as their comrades bleed out next to them, but these are things that audiences broadly have become desensitized to with war violence being readily available online (rest in peace to the incredibly evil but morbidly fascinating video-sharing platform LiveLeak). The real trick that 2000 Meters to Andriivka is able to pull is showing how meaningless the violence becomes when put into close-up. The scale of the conflict can’t be seen from this one tiny strip of land, just another body going down only to be replaced by another for the meatgrinder as they steal another couple of meters from the enemy.
When the Ukrainian soldiers finally reach a liberated Andriivka (the rubble of what’s left of it), they find a wounded Russian officer whom they try to get intel out of. He tells them there’s no one left to find in the village. In a moment of frustration, one of the Ukrainian soldiers says, “Why the fuck did you come here?” The Russian mutters something. “What?” “I don’t know why we came here.”
Often when Chernov talks to a soldier in the film, he’ll interject with a narration to let the audience know how many more months it would be after the interview when they will die. During the final advance to Andriivka, we watch as a soldier named Gagarin goes down, and his comrade holds his hand as his body goes lifeless and another soldier comes up to take his place and keep pushing forward. After Andriivka is liberated, Chernov cuts ahead to Gagarin’s funeral. The world fades to night as men from his company stand around a fire, their commander yelling the names of the dead while they respond “present,” as if the men are still with them. After the film fades to black and the voices cease, Chernov unveils a title card saying Andriivka was taken back by the Russians. The war goes on.