Synopsis
On February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin launches a full-scale war to invade Ukraine. Eight years earlier, his army and security services had been working in secret to establish Russian control over an oblast in the east of the country, which proclaimed itself the “Donetsk People’s Republic”. This is where the protagonists of this film – Oleg and Max, two young Russians in their thirties – have come to fight against the Ukrainians, as part of a paramilitary unit working on the front line to conquer new territories. Over the course of days and weeks, through Moscow-ordered battles and the funerals of their comrades-in-arms, the film tells, from a first-person perspective, their disillusionment with a cause that was not what the Russian state propaganda of a new “Great Patriotic War” against Nazism had sold them. A rare immersion into the daily lives and minds of combatants on that side of the front line, for a unique and indispensable account of the “First Ukrainian War”. The film is presented in its reissued version from 2025.
A word from Tënk
While the third anniversary of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was recently marked, Oleg's Choice offers a revisit to the war years earlier, in 2016, in the Donbass, in the east of the country. The intimate perspective of the camera provides an insight into a unit of Russian volunteer soldiers, where the everyday monotony only makes the brutality of the war more vivid. Over the battalion, composed of a handful of barely adult young men, hangs the shadow of a tragedy: the death of part of the group, killed in combat.
In the face of this loss, the young soldiers question themselves. Why did they go to fight? Immersed in the limbo of war, they reassess the ideals of justice that motivated them when they enlisted. The glaring lack of organization and equipment, combined with the pain of having to return the emaciated remains of their sons, who left too soon, to the grieving parents, underscores the growing malaise and the nagging feeling of being part of a fratricidal war.
While the current negotiations between U.S. President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart resemble a mere commercial transaction between two powers, Oleg's Choice sheds light once again on the ideological paradox long upheld by Russian propaganda, where the heroic narrative of Ukraine’s “liberation” clashes with the brutal reality of combat. Moving beyond the mere strategic dimension of the war, the documentary delves into the tension of an incoherent belief system and how it manifests through the broken bodies and weary minds of a lost youth.
Fanny Tran
Researcher in residence
Center on Multidimensional Conflicts
Chaire Raoul-Dandurand
