Firefighters work near a residential building damaged by a Russian strike in Lviv, Ukraine, on Sept. 4.Lviv City Council/The Associated Press
Lidiia Karpenko is a Ukrainian journalist living in Toronto and a member of PEN Canada’s Writers in Exile group.
Canada is a country that lives by an established set of values. I like those values, because they’re about respecting other people and their privacy, equality and supporting diversity. But there are people who abuse the kindness of those who have accepted those values and who follow the rules, and take advantage of our tolerance.
The Russian-Canadian filmmaker Anastasia Trofimova’s latest documentary, Russians at War, premiered at the Venice International Film Festival last week. The movie, which received $340,000 from the Canada Media Fund, was included in this year’s Toronto International Film Festival program, too, and screens this week. According to the TIFF website, the film “takes us beyond the headlines to join Russian soldiers,” some of whom took up arms because they believed they were “going to vanquish Ukrainian Naziism” and restore the “cultural unity between Russia and Ukraine.” This sentence is already filled with phrases ripped from propaganda directed by the Kremlin, which has been looking for Nazis in Ukraine since 2014, but hasn’t found them yet – because they don’t exist.
Ms. Trofimova has said that during her seven months at the front lines alongside Russian soldiers – in the occupied territory of Ukraine – she did not see any war crimes. Ms. Trofimova also said she was there without Moscow’s permission. This is impossible to imagine: Nothing happens so easily in totalitarian Russia. It is noteworthy that she worked for years at RT Documentary, a sister channel of state-funded RT, which is banned in the U.S. and Canada.
Some reviews of the movie say Russians At War offers a new lens on the conflict, which was likely a selling point in efforts to raise funds for the movie.
But at what cost?
The tolerance that is a hallmark value of democracy has been perverted to allow Canadian taxpayer money to fund this whitewashing. Even loud condemnation from diplomats, politicians and the Ukrainian-Canadian community – in addition to TVO pulling its financial support and planned broadcast of Russians At War on Tuesday – has not convinced TIFF to withdraw it.
According to Variety, the director “strives to put a human face on the countless disposable and interchangeable cogs in the Kremlin’s relentless war machine.” Ms. Trofimova, for her part, has expressed surprise that these soldiers turned out to be so human. In a 2017 interview, she voiced similar surprise about an Islamic State fighter she was filming: “I feel a kind of compassion for him, and I realize that he’s a human being … I felt like a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal: when he sees the fascists for the first time and realizes that they are exemplary family men,” she admitted. “But this does not prevent them from going out and killing, raping, torturing.”
But did anyone ever doubt that it wasn’t human beings who invaded Ukraine to occupy it? Was anyone wondering if parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and Crimea had been taken over by robots or aliens?
It was and is people – Russian soldiers – who hid their insignia before enacting their occupation. And it is Russian people – who, yes, have families and friends – who have been killing Ukrainian civilians for three years. Did we forget about those people?
Let’s not forget that it was Russia that launched the conflict that those soldiers are continuing to fight, by aggressively invading the territory of another independent state in defiance of international law. There, they have reportedly committed atrocities. According to a United Nations report presented on Sept. 6, there had been at least 36,357 Ukrainian civilian casualties from Feb. 24, 2022 to the end of August, 2024, including 11,743 deaths. These numbers are likely to be underestimates.
Russian soldiers have families, but Ukrainians are still mourning the Bazylevych family. On the night of Sept. 4, Yevhenia Bazylevych and her three daughters – Yaryna, Daryna and Emilia – were killed in their Lviv apartment by Russian rockets. They were sleeping; they will never wake up. Only their father Yaroslav survived; surely, he will be haunted by this tragedy for the rest of his life. Unfortunately, they are just one of thousands of Ukrainian families that have been destroyed by Russians.
Miraculously, Ms. Trofimova did not see any of these crimes. Trying to present soldiers as victims or survivors on top of that is an insult.
Ms. Trofimova has called the invasion “unjustified” and “illegal.” But if she believes that, she should give her footage to Ukrainian prosecutors and The Hague, which should convict not only Vladimir Putin and his entourage, but also the ordinary Russians who did the actual killing. And if those soldiers really want the war to end, they should lay down their arms and leave Ukraine.