Russia’s Vile New Anti-Ukraine Propaganda
A sick, slick government-funded feature film hijacks Holocaust movie tropes and depicts Ukrainians as Nazis.
LAST WEEK, RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA achieved a new low in its quest to sell Russia’s war in Ukraine. A slickly produced but extremely unsubtle feature film underwritten by Vladimir Putin’s government falsely suggests that the Russian invasion was merely a preemptive strike about an imminent Ukrainian attack; that it’s a war against “Nazis,” not Ukrainians; and that the atrocities known around the world as Russian war crimes in Ukraine were actually perpetrated by the Ukrainian side. The fictional story of a Belgian Jewish violinist who accidentally becomes an eyewitness to the awful truth, the film deliberately evokes World War II and Holocaust films, above all Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, to frame Ukraine’s defenders as the new Nazis.
The movie, Witness (Свидетель, “Svidetel”), which opened in Moscow theaters on August 17, was financed by the Russian Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Culture with additional funding from NTV, one of Russia’s main national propaganda channels. When its release was first announced in late July, the film was billed as a fictionalized telling of the “real” story of the horrors in Bucha, the Kyiv suburb where over 400 civilians were murdered during the Russian occupation in March 2022. At the time, exiled Russian writer and journalist Dmitry Bykov made the obvious point that Witness was going to toe the state propaganda line, but wistfully mused that he would “love to be proven wrong” on the infinitesimal chance that the filmmakers somehow managed to take the money and make a truthful film about Bucha. Alas, if Witness has any surprises, it’s apparently in the other direction of being even cruder and more loathsome than one might expect.
An important disclaimer: I have not seen Witness. I was fully prepared to suffer for my craft (the movie is over two hours long) and made a good-faith effort to find it online. However, I could only find the trailer, and even that gets periodically removed from YouTube as Russian war propaganda. (It’s also available on RuTube, the Russian analogue.) But the detailed recaps and summaries that have appeared since the film’s release, as well as reviews and interviews with the actors and filmmakers, give a pretty clear picture.
THE PLOT OF WITNESS is built around a virtuoso Belgian violinist, Daniel Cohen, who goes to Moscow for a music competition in February 2022 and gets second place. He also catches the eye of a visiting Ukrainian tycoon who offers him a generous fee (and a private jet for transportation) to play at a private event in Kyiv the next evening. Cohen, a caring single dad anxious to go home to his son, is not particularly keen on the gig, but his manager, Brigitte, tempted by the money, talks him into it. When Cohen talks to his young son on a video call from Kyiv and explains that he’s now in Ukraine, not Russia, the boy asks, “But isn’t Ukraine Russia?” (From the mouths of babes, obviously; screenwriter Sergei Volkov is subtle like that.) At the lavish banquet where Cohen performs, there are strange goings-on. People drink to a mysterious victory (peremoha). The tycoon’s aide, a burly, ferocious-looking man named Dmytro Panchak, is heard telling someone, “Soon, my friend, soon. The fist is already clenched. All that’s left is to hit those Donbas guys hard enough to throw them back all the way to Rostov.”
Then explosions start during the night, and the Belgian visitors wake up to learn about the Russian invasion. (“Russia can’t win this; NATO will break them,” comments Brigitte.) As they leave their hotel, the city is chaos; automatic rifles are being handed out, leading to outbreaks of random gunfire. The tycoon has fled to Israel and the Belgian embassy has fled to Lviv, so Cohen and Brigitte are left on their own. Before long, the duo gets detained at a block post by what appears to be a Ukrainian territorial defense unit, or maybe ordinary thugs in camouflage posing as territorial defense (in the filmmakers’ minds, there is probably little difference). Brigitte is gang-raped and murdered while Cohen is locked in a basement from which he can hear her screams. The next morning, Cohen is rescued by a Ukrainian patrol and put on a train to Lviv with other refugees; however, the train is stopped by more Ukrainian thugs in camouflage who dump the refugees in the woods and commandeer the train to smuggle out draft evaders with dollars to pay. After some more bad experiences with camo-clad Ukrainian baddies, the hapless violinist ends up in a fictional village called Semidveri, where his old acquaintance Panchak commands an Azov regiment unit.
This sets up a lengthy climactic scene that the filmmakers clearly see as the revelation of the true face of Ukrainian Nazism. After Cohen angrily confronts Panchak, telling him, “You’re all murderers!” the colonel orders an assistant to take him to the torture room in the basement; while Cohen himself suffers only minor abuse, he is forced to watch locals being brutally tortured for no apparent reason. (One victim vainly tries to save himself by shouting “Slava Ukraini!” and “I voted for Zelensky.”) Later, Cohen is ordered to play the violin to entertain Azov officers—some of them in actual Hitler t-shirts—during their drunken revels. Panchak himself has a copy of Mein Kampf on his table and gives a speech extolling “purity of blood,” but takes umbrage when Cohen offers to play the Nazi anthem, the Horst Wessel Song: “You think we’re Nazis?” he bellows. “Heil Hitler and all that? We’re not Nazis! We’re fighters. We’re fighting for the happiness of Ukraine.” A short while later, he reverently displays to Cohen a framed relief portrait of Hitler, quotes “the great man’s” words about struggle as life’s first principle, and remarks that conscience was “made up by Jews.”
In the end, Cohen pleases his captors enough that he is not only allowed to live but offered a reward in the form of a sex slave to pick among the local women forced to wait on the Azov officers. Declining is not an option: “What, are you gay?” the odious Panchak menacingly inquires. The woman Cohen chooses (and obviously does not coerce into sex) is an English teacher and single mom whose son Mischa was earlier shown being verbally abused by Panchak for having a Russian name; the boy and his mother quickly become his new friends.
But the tragic finale is near. One morning, military vehicles with Ukrainian flags arrive at the village; the residents are told that they must leave at once because the Russians are coming with murderous intent. Everyone is instructed to gather at the train station; Cohen comes along. After Panchak gives an interview to a clueless CNN crew saying that he and his brothers are off to fight, the Ukrainian soldiers get in their cars and leave, warning the refugees to stay inside the station. Sensing something wrong, Cohen runs after the cars; just then, a rocket hits the station building, apparently killing all the people inside—among them Mischa and his mom. A wounded and shellshocked Cohen sits listlessly on the ground holding Mischa’s teddy bear. Moments later, he is saved by Russian soldiers whose cars sport the letter V, one of the symbols of the “special operation” in Ukraine.
At the Belgian embassy in Moscow, the officials think Cohen suffered at the hands of the Russians; his insistence that he was held captive by Ukrainians is assumed to be “Stockholm syndrome.” Later, a European Commission official thinks the same thing when Cohen returns to Belgium. (At the airport, he is verbally abused by two pro-Ukraine activists wearing hoodies stained with fake blood after he responds to their plea to support Ukraine with a brusque Russian nyet.) The film ends with Cohen in a TV studio where he has been invited to talk about his ordeal. Before going on the air, he watches an interview with Panchak, whose unit was able to expel the Russians from Semidveri; Panchak claims that before the Russians left the village, they herded the local residents into the train station and then fired a rocket. When the host asks Cohen if he’s ready to talk about the crimes of the Kremlin regime, Cohen—holding the dead boy’s teddy bear—replies, “Yes, I will tell you what really happened. I lost my hearing there, but I did not lose my conscience.”
And that’s the end, except for the closing titles which state that the (real-life) bombing of the maternity hospital and the drama theater in Mariupol in March 2022, the murders of civilians in Bucha in March 2022, and the rocket strike on the train station in Kramatorsk in April 2022 were “crimes of the Kiev regime” which Ukraine blamed on Russia. The titles also say that Witness is “dedicated to the memory of all the victims.”
WITNESS IS THUS CLEARLY MEANT to be not only a dramatization of Russia’s through-the-looking-glass version of Bucha, but also of other Russian atrocities. More broadly, the film consistently projects onto Ukrainians crimes committed by Russian soldiers in Ukraine and abundantly corroborated: everything from looting (the building where Cohen and Brigitte are held captive early on has a stash of looted washing machines and TV sets) to sexual violence. The Ukrainian villain is even given homophobic lines, an interesting choice given how heavily anti-LGBT rhetoric figures in official Russian narratives of Ukraine’s capture by Western corruption.
It is worth noting that the film does not even make an effort to construct a plausible storyline. The villainous Panchak seems to be discussing an assault on the Russian-controlled enclaves in Donbas literally on the eve of the February 24, 2022 invasion—which is obviously meant to validate the Kremlin’s claims that the invasion was a preemptive strike against a planned Ukrainian attack in Donbas. But Vladimir Putin had already ordered Russian forces to enter the Donbas enclaves on February 21 when he announced Russia’s formal recognition of the “People’s Republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk. For that matter, the fact that Cohen and Brigitte seem completely unaware of the tensions around Ukraine days before the invasion, when war was widely seen as virtually unavoidable, is (to put it mildly) not very realistic. Meanwhile, Panchak somehow successfully manages to pin the train-station rocket strike on departing Russian troops even though the timing of the strike—moments after a CNN crew leaves the scene—would clearly show that it took place when Ukrainian troops were leaving the town. You don’t need to dissect the plot very closely for it to fall apart.
While even unsympathetic reviewers concede that the film is visually well-made, to call the script heavy-handed would be an understatement. Even the non-villainous characters are mostly caricatures: Brigitte, for example, is depicted as an obnoxious, entitled Western European woman who thinks both Russians and Ukrainians are brutish savages. And, even aside from the grotesque depiction of the “Ukro-Nazis” of Azov, Witness consistently demonizes Ukrainian language and culture. The camouflage-wearing thug who drags Brigitte up the stairs to be raped and murdered sings a popular Ukrainian folk song. The Azov “Nazis” demand that Cohen play “Oi u luzi chervona kalyna,” the famous Ukrainian patriotic march that has become a symbol of resistance. And Ukrainian language is associated with villainy much as German is in old movies about World War II. A sarcastic review on the cautiously liberal Russian website Fontanka notes that Panchak, “like the film’s other villains, periodically starts speaking or yelling in Ukrainian; these linguistic transitions always bode ill for other characters.” The more openly dissident website SOTA points out that the film’s “good Ukrainians” are invariably Russian speakers, while “bad Ukrainians speak Ukrainian” and are depicted as lacking all humanity, “just like in a classic film about Nazis.”
Having a frail, terrified, persecuted Jewish musician as the film’s central victim underscores the World War II parallels, in particular to The Pianist; as both Fontanka and SOTA note, Cohen (Karen Badalov) even looks like an older version of the Polish Jewish musician played by Adrien Brody in the Polanski film. That the makers of Witness were intentionally going for an homage to (or ripoff of) The Pianist is further suggested by the fact that its original title was The Musician. The reason it was changed in post-production is as surreally absurd as everything else about this film: It was reportedly because of the mutiny of Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner mercenary group, in whose coy lingo the group is known as “the orchestra” and its fighters as “musicians.”
Obviously, the Holocaust exploitation adds to the overall vileness of Witness. What’s not entirely clear is the purpose of this film, or its intended audience. While it seems to have been made with Western marketing in mind—much of the dialogue is in English, translated in Russian voiceover for the Russian screenings—it’s not very likely to change any minds outside Russia. (If Russia had actual facts to present about war crimes in Ukraine, it would presumably present them in a documentary, not in a fictional narrative.) For that matter, it’s not very likely to change any minds in Russia, either; the only people who would find it compelling are ones who have already bought the propaganda line hook, line, and sinker. According to early reports, it is playing to virtually empty auditoriums. These days, Russian audiences want escapism, like last year’s record-grossing Cheburashka, a feel-good family comedy about the adventures of a cute and fluffy magical creature and its human friends. Those who want war propaganda can get it on TV without paying for a movie ticket.
In the end, Witness is stupid, morally obscene, dishonest, and pointless. Which makes it a perfect metaphor for Russia’s war.