Frontline: "Uktraine: Life Under Russia's Attack" (WGBH, PBS, August 2022-February 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (February 14) I wanted to watch the PBS Frontline documentary “Ukraine: Life Under Russia’s Attack,” which turned out to be an episode from August 2022 with an additional final section updating the story. The show took place in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city and one just 25 miles from Ukraine’s border with Russia. Of course this made it a prime target for Russia’s assault when it started in February 2022. The residents of Kharkiv were startled by the sheer ferocity of the attack and its indiscriminate nature, targeting apartment buildings and other civilian targets (which seems to be the way Russia makes war these days, though they’ve done it before and so have other countries: the concept of so-called “strategic bombing” of civilian populations via aircraft was invented by the British in Iraq right after World War I and was extensively used by both sides in World War II). What especially surprised the inhabitants of Kharkiv about the Russian attack was they’d always considered themselves Russians: many of them spoke Russian as thei first language and had relatives across the border in Russia whom they visited frequently until the war started. (The distinction between Russian and Ukrainian seems to me to be much like the difference between Spanish and Portuguese; though they’re separate enough they’re distinct languages and not just dialects, they have an awful lot of words in common and they clearly have similar roots.)

The documentary had a very retro feel about it; except for the fact that it was in color and clearly shot with modern video equipment, it could have been a newsreel film from World War II. I was especially struck by the way Kharkiv’s residents moved into the subway tunnels to shelter themselves from the Russian attacks, much the way Londoners had during World War II to shelter themselves from the German Blitz. The films profiled several Ukrainians from Kharkiv, of whom the most moving story was that of Roman, a Kharkiv firefighter who in the opening scene is shown trying to teach his daughter Violetta to speak English. “I don’t like English,” she says, making it clear she’d rather be doing just about anything else than studying a foreign language with her dad as her teacher. Roman lived in Kharkiv with his wife Marina and their daughter Violetta, and of the four Ukrainians the show profiled he was the only one who could speak English, albeit with a thick enough accent his comments were subtitled just like the others, who according to the official PBS transcript for the show, were speaking Russian (not Ukrainian). The others included Sergiy (the official transcript gives the Ukrainian spelling of his first name,though he almost certainly uses the Russian “Sergei,” or whatever its equivalent is in Cyrillic letters), whose apartment was destroyed in a direct hit from a Russian bomb and was thereby rendered homeless; Vika,who told the filmmakers, “Being in the Metro is safer than staying at home”; and Tatjana,hwo lost her father to a Russian bomb.

Vika’s account of her family’s flight is all too typical of what modern-day war does to innocent civilian victims: “At 3 o’clock we heard explosions. We knew it was not thunder and lightning. There was firing. We got into the car, but then the whole car jumped. My mother was panicking because it was scary. The planes were flying above. We were afraid. We were shaking. We understand that there is a war, but we don’t understand why it has started.” (Neither does anybody else, with the possible exception of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who hasn’t given his own people a coherent explanation of what he insists be called a “special military operation” is about or what it’s meant to accomplish.)