Ukraine: Enemy in the Woods, review: so intimate you’ll feel like you’re on the frontline

The war in Ukraine must already have the largest and boldest filmic archive of any on record. But news cameras have been able to stray only as close as they dare to the frontline in the east. That changes with Ukraine: Enemy in the Woods (BBC Two), where footage is recorded on bodycams worn by soldiers of Berlingo Special Battalion defending a railway line in a Donbas forest.

“Forgive us our trespasses,” pray heartbreakingly young men with names like Goblin and Skull before heading out to their chilly foxholes, “as we forgive those who trespass against us.” There’s not much forgiveness when countless Russian cannon fodder – they call them “orcs” or “f----ts” – lie dead in the snow or get captured alive. “Why the f--k did you come to our country?” one fresh captive is asked. For money, comes the answer.

The pity of modern warfare is here in the raw. It’s the horror tropes of Vietnam but below zero. Bodycams issued by director Jamie Roberts capture it all: what it’s like to be hunted by a drone; to move through wintry woods with no sight of the nearby enemy; to shoot and be shot at in the blindness of night; to come upon the bodies of comrades in a dugout.

In the most explanatory clip of all, a soldier called Cuckoo is ordered to move to another foxhole. We hear him speak and see him head out. Then there’s a blackout and, a minute of screen time later, his corpse is stiffening in the undergrowth.

What impact such a precarious existence in the liminal zone between life and death can have on Ukraine’s young defenders emerges in quietly grim interviews back at base. “I imagine they’re still alive but serving elsewhere,” says Natalia, a young vet recruited as a medic, her eyes brimming as she remembers the fallen.

“It would be great if you could take a pill to erase my memories,” adds Vovan, the charming unit leader who plans to spend a year off with his children after victory. Whether victory can ever come is not confronted. Their reality is that help rarely comes from Kyiv or beyond, in either reinforcements or munitions. 

So this powerful and unfiltered dispatch may perhaps work as propaganda to reignite Western support. Ukraine’s combatants can supply the mordant wit and the doughty courage. The rest must be imported.

Ukraine: Enemy in the Woods is available now on BBC iPlayer