January, in Kherson, a city in southern Ukraine just liberated after five months of Russian occupation. The second phase of the war begins. While the resistance licks its wounds, Ukrainian intelligence and sabotage units begin harassment operations against Russian forces, installed on the other side of the Dnieper, this wide river now forming the front line.
In a report with a breathtaking pace, selected for the Albert-Londres prize, Gwendoline Debono, special correspondent for France 24, recounts the completed clandestine struggle of the former, and inserts into her montage episodes of real combat, filmed with a subjective camera (GoPro ). A journalist experienced in war zones – crowned with the Bayeux prize for war reporting in 2017 and 2018 – she captures the tragedy of the situation. And restores all its complexity.
In particular this extraordinarily risky mission consisting, for civilians surviving in the occupied zone, of transmitting military intelligence to the Ukrainian army, despite the close surveillance carried out by the army and Russian counter-espionage. Members of the Ukrainian resistance testify. Farmers, city councilors, retirees, they tell how they deceived the omnipresent enemy and escaped the denunciation of their sometimes pro-Russian neighbors, while being aware that they risked the worst. The arrest, detention in appalling conditions, and systematic torture which the occupier engaged in – and still engages in – on Ukrainians suspected of still being loyal to their homeland.
Astonishing courage
Filmed under Russian bombings, the report on these “shadow soldiers”, which lasts thirty-five minutes, also recounts the organization, execution and aftermath of an extremely dangerous operation carried out by an intelligence unit of the Ukrainian army: the night attack, by an amphibious commando, of a Russian command center on the other bank of the Dnieper. An operation that goes wrong and that we experience in real time, through other members of the unit glued to their radio, hanging on the fate of their comrades. It’s impossible not to feel empathy for these fighters resisting the invader.
“These characters are all civilians thrown into war. Nothing predestined them to this ordeal. One was a fisherman, the other a violinist. I told about their commitment,” relates Gwendoline Debono, who was able to build a bond of trust with her interlocutors and took care to keep in touch with each of them. “The violinist was subsequently seriously injured in the face, but he returned to fight,” she told Le Monde.
Young or old, men or women, all demonstrate astonishing courage, a physical commitment that the journalist explains by the awareness that it is an “existential struggle”.