• Geopolitics
• Ukraine

The Battle for Kyiv, directed by British Lebanese journalist (and FP contributor) Oz Katerji and released in the United States and Britain on June 6, documents the chaos, panic, and sheer danger of those early days in unvarnished detail. The film, which premiered last year, is difficult but essential viewing for those who need reminding of what Putin did in 2022. Katerji skillfully transports his audience back in time to the horror of those first few weeks. This film succeeds in communicating the suffocating terror of being in the firing line of one of the world’s most powerful militaries as it attempts to seize your country.

It begins with Katerji reporting from the ground in Kyiv. In February 2022, the city looks unrecognizable compared to today. Army checkpoints and barricades block streets that, in 2025, people walk with comparative freedom.

Inside Kyiv, Katerji films where children in desperate need of kidney dialysis are crowded in a basement, unable to safely leave the city. We see Russian missiles take out the city’s TV tower, cutting Ukraine’s capacity to spread critical information. We see how major broadcasters and diplomatic missions were forced to leave Kyiv—and how the city responded to being abandoned.

In a still from The Battle for Kyiv, Ukrainian member of Parliament Sviatoslav Yurash, along with his aides, visit the front line of the war.IMDB

The Battle for Kyiv is, at its heart, the story of how Ukraine’s capital, government, and president stood, despite Putin’s best efforts.

“The reason Kyiv’s defenses weren’t breached,” Katerji says, “is because of the resistance put up by the men and women defending Ukraine in Bucha and in other places. The city still stands, the government still stands, because the Russians were stopped there.”

The film shows us civilian victims as well as defenders. Katerji visits Irpin, where hundreds of Ukrainians are trying to make their escape from Russian bombardment. The bridge out of Irpin had been destroyed, with cars abandoned and dead bodies sprawled across the road. We see parents fleeing with children and people carrying their dogs. We see the elderly struggle to dodge bodies while making their way to a makeshift wooden bridge—the only route out. All the while, we hear Russian forces bombing the evacuation route.

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On the outskirts of Irpin, just 12 days into the war, Katerji and his team accidentally find themselves at a Russian checkpoint. We hear the raw terror in their voices as they talk their way through, the menacing threat of a Russian turret gun pointed at their car the whole time.

The most chilling scenes come when he visits the city of Bucha, less than an hour from Kyiv by car. The trip takes place on April 4, just days after Russian forces had been forced from the city. Before reaching the city, Katerji says he was “very aware we were heading to a place where war crimes had happened.”

Ukrainian civilians who hadn’t fled the city rushed to tell their stories. Serhiy Lubchuk, a Bucha resident, describes how Russian forces locked 113 people in a basement and “beat us with the rifles.” He says that they hit his brother, Yura, so hard that he died on the spot. “Mama,” he says to the camera, “you need to come and get him. Honestly, these Russians are fucking crazy. Please, help Ukraine.”

An apartment building in Kyiv after it was hit by a Russian airstrike, in a still from The Battle for Kyiv.IMDB

The film takes us inside some of the buildings in Bucha. Katerji describes what he sees as “systemic,” a word that feels appropriate for what comes next, when the crew discover a mass grave.

The horrors of the Bucha massacre are now well known, but the impact of piles of bodies thrown on top of one another, only crudely covered in dirt, still hits hard. Some of the bodies are covered in garbage bags, but it is possible to make out limbs in various stages of decomposition. This ghoulish pit was dug in the shadow of a typically beautiful Ukrainian church.

In just over an hour, Katerji takes us from day one, when Ukraine’s defeat felt inevitable to many in the West, to more sedate scenes later in the early days of the war, including in Bucha, where a memorial now sits on the site of the mass grave. The film packs in plenty of human detail as well as historical moments. We see the risks volunteers took when delivering aid to places under Russian control, driving through forests where they could have been shot any at any moment. We meet a young soldier with blue hair who says she is fighting for her girlfriend. And we hear repeated pleas from Ukrainian civilians, asking for help at a time when it must have felt their country was bound to fall.

Since returning to the White House, Donald Trump has put pressure on both Kyiv and Moscow to agree to some kind of peace deal. Alarmingly, he has placed equal blame on both parties, scolding Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office and blaming him for being invaded. Even if Trump doesn’t know how the war in Ukraine might end, one would have hoped he’d remember how it began.

A Ukrainian tank commander prepares to enter Bucha from Irpin, in a still from The Battle for Kyiv.IMDB

Three years have passed. Ukraine is still at war, people are still being killed, drones are still being fired at Kyiv, and air raid sirens still go off daily. But those early fears that Ukraine would fall in days feel distant—even for those of us following the war closely.

The Battle for Kyiv lays all of this out with uncomplicated clarity. Katerji doesn’t muddy the core narrative of his film by attempting to unpack the geopolitics or recent history of the region. Of course, those things are important, but they also start an inevitable secondary conversation that dilutes a simple point: Russia started this and could stop at any point.

Ukraine has become the frontline in a war between the West and the new axis of autocracies: Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. The least we in the West can do, as international pressure grows for peace in Ukraine, is remember what Russia did and what it hoped to achieve on Feb. 24, 2022.

Those who have been quick to lecture Ukraine and its president on what the country should be doing right now would do well to watch this film and remind themselves of who the West’s friends are, where our interests lie, and who deserves our support.

The Battle for Kyiv is out now on Prime Video, Apple TV+, and Google Play.