7 films to help make sense of the invasion of Ukraine right now

This Netflix documentary is being flagged by Sean Penn, currently in Ukraine to make a film of his own, as essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand the spirit of the country and its defiance of the Russian military machine. It charts the 93 days of revolution that blazed in 2013-14, centring on Kyiv’s Maidan Square and set on toppling the corrupt regime of Putin-toadying president Viktor Yanukovych. The tension between pro-Russian political forces and a more European-centric popular movement explodes in footage of mass protests and violent clashes that’s smartly cut together by David Fincher’s editor Angus Wall. American-Israeli director Evgeny Afineevsky will be well worth following on Twitter too.

A black comedy that reimagines the 2014-15 Russian incursion into Donbass as a kind of Four Lions or Wag the Dog-like satire made up of 13 farcical, feel-bad vignettes. On the agenda is fake news and the reliability of the media – an especially topical theme – and state-fuelled violence and the absurdity of off-the-cuff propagandists trying to win hearts and minds in between chaining saboteurs to lampposts. It’s backdropped, of course, by the civil war between Ukrainian nationalists and Russia’s proxy ‘People’s Republic’ in the east of the country. As with his doc Maidan, Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa is not here to provide a Wiki-esque overview of the historical context, but Donbass still has a strange clarity all of its own.

Best known for Russian Ark, his one-take tableau of Russia history (like, all of it), Alexander Sokurov has also essayed the country’s military-industrial complex through humane character studies that bring wider perspective to the Russian side of the conflict. This one follows an old woman, Alexandra, played by famous opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya, who schleps to Grozny to find her soldier grandson during the second Chechen war. The Siberian filmmaker was the son of a Soviet army officer and speaks for how anti-war sentiment coexists with a militaristic regime. ‘You can kill,’ says Alexandra. ‘When will you build?’

Alex Gibney’s Amazon Prime documentary about Russian oligarch-turned-dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky is an eye-opening watch for anyone keen to understand the pyramid of cronyism, mutual enrichment and threat that props up Vladimir Putin’s regime. Like most oligarchs, Khodorkovsky made a motza in post-glasnost Russia, only to fall foul of the president and end up in a gulag. He’s now an important opposition figure, but as this doc makes apparent, his motives remain somewhat oblique. Gibney’s film is a valuable insight into the psyche of the men who pose Putin’s most direct threat.

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s masterpiece is one of those unsparing takedowns of modern Russia that might have landed the auteur a Palme d’Or or a spell in a camp. Somehow Zvyagintsev, a geniunely courageous figure, gets his films made outside the state’s system. It enables him to throw stones at the Kafka-like hellscape of corruption and repression that is Putin’s Russia: in Leviathan, the victim of it all is a man whose efforts to stop a corrupt local mayor taking his home plunge him into a personal purgatory. Soviet leaders are used as target practice and a picture of Putin hangs on the mayor’s office wall – it’s a small story with much wider resonance. 

It’s already difficult not to watch events in Kyiv, Kharkov and other Ukrainian cities without thinking of Aleppo. This devastating 2019 documentary plunges into the dusty maelstrom of the Syrian city as it comes under siege from Assad’s forces and gets pulverised by Putin’s Russian bombers. Syrian journalist-turned-filmmaker Waad Al-Kateab captures the raw courage of Aleppo’s citizens as they cling on under fire – and the sheer callousness of Russian airstrikes on hospitals. Civilians were considered fair game then, and they are again. 

Another doc about the Maidan revolution of early 2014, this time assembled with a more observational, elliptical eye by director Sergei Loznitsa. Don’t expect as much context as in Netflix’s Winter on Fire, or a voiceover to steer through the background, but do strap in for a front seat in Kyiv’s Independence Square as the protests swell and noise and burning tyre fumes fill the air.