“Special Operation is not an easy watch, but the further removed from it you get, the more Radynski’s film takes on meaning.”

In the early days of the invasion of Ukraine the Russian army occupied the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, a site once home to the largest nuclear disaster in history. On February 24, 2022, tanks and armed vehicles rolled into the complex to establish a military base intended to feed the attempt to occupy Ukraine’s capital Kyiv. The Russian expectation was to roll over the Ukrainian army and take the city in a couple of days. The subsequent failure to do so meant that the troops stationed at Chernobyl got stuck there for five weeks, and were eventually forced to abandon the plant. With heavy fighting in the vicinity of the complex the world held its breath, anxious to know if another nuclear catastrophe was about to happen. Thankfully it didn’t.

Other than the news articles at the time, very little information about that brief occupation of Chernobyl had come out until now. But Ukrainian documentarist Oleksiy Radynski has now crafted a glimpse into not only this specific time period at the plant, but more broadly speaking into the banality of warfare. Using CCTV footage from a number of cameras located both inside and outside the complex’s buildings, Radynski creates a silent witness to occupation, but also a continuity of life before, during, and after war passes. Watching Special Operation, the cruelly euphemistic name the Russians have given their war on their neighbor, is somewhat of an endurance test even at its brief runtime of a little over an hour. But as the monotony of the images sinks in, while the cameras swivel and zoom, there is an odd hopefulness in watching aggressors and, quite frankly, war criminals get stuck in limbo and eventually move on. The plant remains, unmoved, as permanent and lasting as the natural world that surrounds it, a natural world that has seen far worse and survived.

Special Operation is, truth be told, more a journalistic and legal document than it is a cinematic one. Every shot in the film is evidence of nuclear war crimes, and every soldier shown in the footage could (and should) be tried at the ICC in The Hague, if that court had any respect left in this world. What is shown, however, is not very ‘exciting’, for lack of a better word, and often quite mundane: we see soldiers loitering, taking a smoke break, unloading food rations (including a staggering number of loafs of bread), and generally not doing much more than standing around. While we do get audio evidence of occasional heavy shelling in the distance, the version of war shown in the film is quite boring. A sobering text at the end of the film informs us that the units we saw doing pretty much nothing were involved in mass killings of civilians. That is the ugly face of war, but Radynski chooses not to show us. Slapping us in the face with this fact at the end of the film is perhaps a more powerful way to underline the cruelty of these men.

Much like in Oksana Karpovych’s highly lauded Intercepted last year, Special Operation relies on static imagery without commentary to get its message across, a message that is in some ways shared between the two films. In the opening shots we see vehicles roll in, in the closing shots we see them roll out. Has much changed on their temporary base? Not really, life continues as if they hadn’t been there. In perhaps the most poignant scene of the film we see two stray dogs at night sniffing their way through the snow, unbothered by the activity around them. It is a reminder that evil may come and go, but nature will always remain, and to an extent so will Ukraine. Special Operation is not an easy watch, but the further removed from it you get, the more Radynski’s film takes on meaning.