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War is hard to watch\u2014real war, that is, not the stuff of video games or action movies. The closer you get to combat, the more jarring it becomes. Death comes randomly. The noise is terrifying; the fear is stifling. And most people can\u2019t bear to see what war actually does to the human body\u2014how a brief instant can transform a living, breathing person into ugly scraps of flesh.<\/p>\n
The fighting in Ukraine has, in many ways, transformed the nature of warfare. As many as 80 percent<\/a> of battle casualties are now inflicted by drones, not machine guns, artillery, or missiles. That number is likely to be similar for armored vehicles and other equipment at the front. As NATO commanders scramble to adapt to the new technologies and ways of fighting, their old military doctrines are no longer worth the paper they\u2019re written on.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n War is hard to watch\u2014real war, that is, not the stuff of video games or action movies. The closer you get to combat, the more jarring it becomes. Death comes randomly. The noise is terrifying; the fear is stifling. And most people can\u2019t bear to see what war actually does to the human body\u2014how a brief instant can transform a living, breathing person into ugly scraps of flesh.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The fighting in Ukraine has, in many ways, transformed the nature of warfare. As many as 80 percent<\/a><\/u><\/span> of battle casualties are now inflicted by drones, not machine guns, artillery, or missiles. That number is likely to be similar <\/span>for armored vehicles and other equipment at the front. <\/span>As NATO commanders scramble to adapt to the new technologies and ways of fighting, their old military doctrines are no longer worth the paper they\u2019re written on.<\/p>\n Yet the war has also revolutionized how we witness war. Since it started in February 2022, Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been an oddly intimate affair, flooding the world with unprecedented close-ups of the battlefield. This is the result of the wide use of two powerful technologies: the camera-equipped drone and the GoPro-style action camera. Drones offer startlingly clear <\/a>views of battlefield<\/a><\/u><\/span>s and chart the final moments of flying munitions zeroing in on their targets<\/a>. Bodycams bring the viewer directly into the action\u2014sometimes too close for comfort<\/a>. We used to talk about the \u201cfog of war.\u201d Now military planners, in Ukraine and beyond, are struggling coming to terms with the transparent battlefield<\/a>, where almost every move can be observed and countered in real time.<\/p>\n The Ukrainian filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov<\/a> and his colleagues, who won the Oscar for best documentary in 2024 for their film 20 Days in Mariupol<\/em>,<\/a> have created a record of the war that uses both of these tools to powerful effect. 2000 Meters to Andriivka<\/em><\/a> tracks a particular moment in the Ukrainian counteroffensive of 2023, when Kyiv\u2019s soldiers made a heroic but ultimately failed attempt to push the Russians back<\/span>. The soldiers in the film are trying to capture the tiny village of Andriivka in the Donbas region, a few miles from the city of Bakhmut, a place that has seen some of the war\u2019s most vicious fighting<\/a>. To do so, they must move forward one mile through what they refer to as \u201cthe forest\u201d\u2014which is actually a narrow strip of greenery, flanked by fields, where nearly every tree has been blasted to bits by artillery fire.<\/p>\n