Donbas

Ukrainian film-maker Maksym Nakonechnyi finished war drama Butterfly Vision last February, just days before the Russian invasion. His film tells a fictional story about a shellshocked female Ukrainian soldier held prisoner for two months by Russian-backed separatists in Donbas during the conflict that began in 2014. It’s a tough, unsparing movie, and possibly not the Ukrainian film that anyone wants to watch right now as the country fights for survival. Nakonechnyi’s reflective script, co-written with Iryna Tsilyk,…

This war movie from Ukraine was made before the full-scale invasion in February, and tells the important story of how Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting in eastern Donbas since 2014. Director Marian Bushan co-wrote the script with schoolteacher-turned-soldier Mykola Voronin, apparently inspired by some of his actual experiences. Their story inevitably resonates, but I watched it with the slightly sinking feeling of witnessing raw truth being fictionalised into bland drama with all the war movie cliches in the…

The jittery, crazed, experimental brilliance of Dziga Vertov’s 1931 film, subtitled The Symphony of the Donbas, still pulses after almost a century, although it should be said right away that the “enthusiasm” of the title is mainly for two things: first, Soviet Russia’s control of Ukraine and, second, coal. Neither of these commands quite the same excitement in 2022.This was Vertov’s first sound film, celebrating the role played by the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine and its mineral and agricultural riches in Joseph…

The Russian-backed Donetsk People's Republic (DNR) and Luhansk People's Republic (LNR) in eastern Ukraine said on Wednesday they had blocked access to Facebook and Instagram, aligning themselves with Russia's policy on the US-based social networks.Moscow recognised the two separatist regions as independent on February 21, and three days later launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in what it calls a "special military operation" aimed partly at protecting Russian-speakers there."Access to the information resources of…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain A study of thousands of stories from media outlets churning out propaganda in Ukraine's Donbas in the years after Russia's first invasion suggests that the Kremlin's disinformation campaign has long neglected any coherent or convincing messaging to foster support for Russia in the war-torn region.…

Ukraine’s arsenal of shoulder-fired anti-armor weapons and drones will need to be augmented by more tanks of their own, armor experts tell The War Zone. Tanks and other armored vehicles will present a much greater challenge for Ukrainian units as the Russian military shifts gears, with a new commander overseeing the concentration of forces in the east, where there is more rural, flat, open land ideal for mechanized warfare.Russia has seen a great deal of armor destroyed in Ukraine in the first 47 days of its all-out…