Ukraine Enemy in the Woods from microsft studios logo Watch Video

⏲ Duration: 59:21
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✓ Published: 28-Mar-2024

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Ukraine: Enemy in the Woods<br/><br/>n this distressingly intimate film, Ukrainian soldiers as young as 19 carry their dying comrades through a freezing forest as the sky turns red with gunfire. Their horror and humanity will never leave you<br/><br/>If the first casualty of war is truth, the second is youth. The average age of British and American soldiers in the First and Second World Wars was 26 — considerably less than that of plastic Hollywood heroes like John Wayne, who donned multiple uniforms and served bravely on a studio backlot.<br/>By the time of the Vietnam War, the average age of US troops had dropped to 22 (Wayne “fought” in that conflict too, aged 62, in an awful film called The Green Berets).<br/><br/>​One of the things that strikes you when watching Ukraine: Enemy in the Woods (BBC2, Monday, March 25), which follows the country’s Berlingo Battalion on a tense seven-week mission through snowy woods near Kupyansk, is how shockingly young everyone on screen is.<br/><br/>A soldier called Roman is just two weeks away from turning 20, an age when a young person should be enjoying their life, not fearing for it.<br/><br/>A unit commander called Vlad was thrust into a leadership role at 19, after just a single combat mission. A third was looking forward to getting his driving licence before the Russians invaded. Even the battalion’s leader, Vovan, looks no older than early to mid-20s.<br/><br/>The unlikeliness of the conflict ending any time soon is forcefully brought home in this riveting documentary, filmed, produced and directed by Jamie Roberts, who also made 2021’s Four Hours at the Capitol.