Suppressing Russian war doc shameful

I watched "Russians at War," the documentary that's caused such a fuss at the Toronto International Film Festival, over the weekend and I kept waiting for the "soft propaganda" for Moscow its critics keep complaining about.

- ANDREW PHILLIPS

It never came.

Instead, as others who have seen the film agree, "Russians at War" is a wrenching portrayal of the boredom, confusion, horror and tragedy of combat. It's the furthest thing from propaganda on behalf of Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine you could imagine.

Russian-Canadian filmmaker Anastasia Trofimova spent seven months with a unit of Russian soldiers, a ragtag mix of conscripts and volunteers, fighting but mostly just surviving in Russianoccupied Ukrainian territory. They drink and smoke and complain constantly about how they've been abandoned by the higher-ups and are being fed into a war machine they don't understand.

A local commander nicknamed Saturn tells Trofimova that "people are being killed in droves and they don't care ... While politicians work out who has the bigger balls there will be many victims. It's time to finish this; enough is enough." The film ends with the funeral of a Russian soldier and images of a graveyard filled with young bodies. "Here lie the ordinary guys on whose bones big politics are made," Trofimova says in a voice-over.