In Spetsialna Operatsiia (Special Operation), Ukrainian filmmaker Oleksiy Radynski presents a hauntingly surreal document of the Russian occupation of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant during February and March 2022. Using roughly a thousand hours of footage captured by security cameras at the site, the film crafts a portrait of war that is as mundane and banal as it is absurd. The result is a work that echoes, by accident or design, last year’s lauded indirect portrayal of the Holocaust, The Zone of Interest. The raw violence of the war and occupation is kept off-screen, letting its presence be felt through distant explosions and the drone of overflying aircraft. The invaders seem to mill about aimlessly in civilian spaces, largely unaware of the historical (and radioactive) weight of the place they inhabit. As in The Zone of Interest, only rarely is this invisible wall broken, with recordings playing the panicked phone-calls of local Ukrainians as they experience the horrors of the invasion firsthand.
The film follows the chronological passage of the occupation more or less exactly. There are only minor deviations from the timeline, explained by the need to show the change of the seasons (as in Berlin, Ukrainian winters are not linear). As such, in order to make sure that the Russian columns are seen rolling into the plant in winter and out again in the spring, the creators used undated establishing shots to illustrate the change more clearly.
However, otherwise, the events that are shown take place in an almost liminal setting that is outside time. People come and go without explanation. Russian state TV journalists and representatives of Rosatom, Russia’s nuclear agency, are shown visiting the plant, as are countless soldiers and the returning shift of Ukrainian nuclear technicians. Doubtless these visits had a purpose to them, but they seem completely random to the viewer, mounted high above. The lack of any narrative only reinforces the aimlessness of what is happening below.
The ongoing war in Ukraine has been characterised, more than any other conflict before, by the enormous quantities of footage released, depicting everything from first-person combat to drone strikes to war crimes. In contrast to this, Spetsialna Operatsiia chooses to capture the first days of the full-scale invasion in a subtle, understated way. This is a war film in which the soldiers are out of place, transplanted into an alien environment where they have no place. They wander the corridors, struggle with doors, hang around smoking, and awkwardly pose for photos. In one particularly memorable scene, a pacing Russian guard examines some unknown object on a windowsill, picking it up and turning it over a few times to have a look, before replacing it, shaking his head and simply walking off. They are not portrayed as conquerors, but rather as confused interlopers who are nonplussed by their surroundings.
I remember at the time that rumours circulated on Telegram suggesting that these particular Russian units had been issued with operational maps published by the Soviet Union in 1983. Crucially, this was three years before the accident that turned Chernobyl into an uninhabitable wasteland, meaning that they would have had little idea of what they were getting into and no concept of basic safety procedures. While this story about the map may be apocryphal, the occupying units did dig trenches in the radioactive ground in the Red Woods, causing many casualties.
The film depicts the Russians with cutting irony right from the start, with a trigger warning saying that the audience will see “explosions and Russians”. Later, a gaggle of state TV crews imported straight from Moscow excitedly swarm around a bread truck, staging a propaganda skit for domestic consumption where their noble heroes deliver humanitarian aid. However, the bread they bring is obviously inedible, having been exposed to radioactive dust — a metaphor so on-the-nose it would not be written in fiction. Later, a senior Rosatom official comes to the plant wearing a NASA hoody — despite the fact that his very presence there symbolises the permanent break between Russia and the West, including their space programmes. The jarring disconnect in these scenes is very effective at getting the film’s point across.
Often, the Russians appear like insects, scurrying around on the ground far below the cameras, which are mounted high up on the roof overlooking the entrance. They are depicted hanging around aimlessly in the forecourt or forming ant-like chains to unload supply vehicles. Only at certain moments are they “humanised”, such as when they struggle to lower the Ukrainian flag and turn off the internal security cameras, with a relatable clumsiness. One sequence of still photographs captures them on their way to and from the showers in various stages of undress. They are no longer interchangeable kitted-up heavies with guns. They are caught in a variety of expressions and poses: some normal, some sinister, some unflattering.
But the effect of this “humanisation” does not inspire sympathy – they appear as the kind of gallery of grotesques that a Dutch old master might have painted into a scene of drunks. I can’t imagine that many people would present their best side when secretly photographed at random intervals leaving the shower, but the effect is still striking. Moreover, the captions periodically remind us that these men are far from harmless, having committed atrocities against the local population in the surrounding region beyond the reach of the cameras. In fact, the footage was given to the filmmakers in cooperation with the Reckoning Project and the Ukrainian Procurator’s Office. It is hoped that it will one day be used in war crimes trials in the quest for justice.
From the perspective of the viewer, the film initially seems to adopt an omniscient, God’s-eye view, observing the Russians from on high. But this impression is broken when the camera pans — revealing that it is not an impartial observer collecting the footage, but a real human being. Only once do the Russians break this fourth wall, taking turns to stare up at the camera with a comically small pocket telescope. The footage was kept, at great personal risk, by employees of the plant looking to store evidence of the occupation that they lived through — an act of resistance and a means of exerting their agency over the occupiers. In fact, the film ends showing us one of these people: a middle-aged Ukrainian technician is himself filmed filming the departing Russian column with his phone out of a window. Those who operated the cameras and saved the film, though, have chosen to remain anonymous.
The film deliberately leaves the Russian occupiers silent. While all of the sound is dubbed (the security cameras were unable to record this), the only voices heard are Ukrainian. They belong to the plant technicians, who are filmed arriving for the second shift (the first shift was forcibly held at the plant for several weeks, neglecting radiation safety protocols). The difference reinforces the gulf between normality, expressed by the workers working at their workplace, and the alien presence of the occupiers. The soldiers awkwardly look over the crowd of chatting Ukrainians.
Much of the film’s emotive power is delivered through an elaborately worked soundscape. Echoing footsteps and rustling cloth are set against distant, rumbling booms and howling animals, simultaneously placing the viewer close to the action, yet making them acutely aware of the cold vastness of the exclusion zone, an environment cultivated by humans but now dominated by nature. The wolves make their appearance when everyone else leaves, a subtle reminder of precisely what we are looking at. While there is, of course, some artistic license in this, the makers of the film paid close attention to the sounds of Chernobyl during the occupation, interviewing the workers at the plant.
In artistic terms, the filmmakers had to decide between explaining many of the finer points of what is being shown, which would have required more captions or audio, or keeping the production’s raw quality and fly-on-the-wall perspective. They chose the second of these two options and that is an understandable decision, but casual viewers would benefit from reading more about the Russian occupation before or after watching.
Spetsialna Operatsiia is an extraordinary documentary, a testament to the strange and terrifying absurdity of war. The full-scale invasion is three years old and an enormous amount has changed, both in the conduct of the fighting and the situation in the wider world, yet the film recaptures perfectly the atmosphere of those early days. An occupying force finds itself lost in a foreign country, unfamiliar with its deadly surroundings and struggling to find any reason to be there. By limiting the action to the security cameras of Chernobyl, the film forces us to witness war not through its battles but through its absurd, uncomfortable silences. It is a quiet, damning indictment of an occupation that, in the end, amounted to little more than a pointless, and immensely destructive, detour into history’s wasteland.