By Christopher Vourlias
'It will be a bloody conflict,' senator warns of possible invasion of Ukraine
When Russian troops invaded Ukraine in the early hours of February 24, 2022, documentarian Olha Zhurba was overcome by an “apocalyptic feeling” that life as she knew it had come to an end. Her first impulse was to take her camera to the streets of Kiev to capture history as it unfolded. “I just knew that I wanted to be here, in the middle of this historic, transformative, apocalyptic time in Ukraine,” Zhurba tells Variety.
Several hundred miles away, Russian-Canadian filmmaker Anastasia Trofimova, who was working as a part-time news producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Moscow bureau, was filming a segment on the Russia-Ukraine border when news of the invasion broke. Her crew continued to shoot live from their hotel balcony as Trofimova returned to her room, reeling from the "deep shock" of what Russian President Vladimir Putin described as a "special military operation."
Hours later, she woke up “with this incredible feeling that your life, yourself, your identity is completely destroyed. Everything you believed in has been thrown out the window,” the director says. She soon began documenting scenes of the war as experienced back home, before joining a Russian army unit for an unprecedented look at the soldiers fighting Putin’s war on the front lines.
