Oleksiy Radynski documents the secret life of Russian soldiers 

On 24th February 2022, the first day of their invasion of Ukraine, the Russian army occupied the Chornobyl exclusion zone, site of the 1986 nuclear disaster. They stayed there until 29th March, leaving when Russian forces retreated more widely from the Kyiv area. For that 33-day period, around 300 workers and security guards were trapped. Among them were operators of security cameras, who, captive behind their desks, furtively recorded the Russian soldiers going about their own business.

Special Operation by Oleksiy Radynski is a product of this footage. The Kyiv-based director had finished work on Chornobyl 22—a  film about an anonymous informant of the Ukrainian Army secretly filming Russian troops at Chornobyl alongside testimonies of the site’s workers—when knowledge of these tapes emerged. “We managed to convince the Office of the Prosecutor General that this footage should be shared with us,” says Radynski. “Thousands of hours of raw material—they had analysed it from their perspective. I think they told us it was kind of an exception, or that they never do this. They never share this kind of footage with filmmakers.”

Acting as ‘forensic evidence’, the thousands of hours have been edited down into a viewable—64-minute—document. But still then nothing much happens—we catch the soldiers in grainy glimpses, standing around and chatting as bombs go off in the distance. Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ is an overused expression, but for Radynski, it has a double meaning: both to show the witless mundanity of a soldier’s day as he goes about committing war crimes, and to dictate a style of spectatorship. “I like boring films,” said Radynski, at the premiere of the film during Berlinale 2025. Yet with boredom also comes a sense of wonder or endlessness, with non-hierarchical images that endow agency in the gaze of the spectator. “I keep seeing new things in the footage I’ve seen a thousand times,” says the director.

A Rabbit’s Foot spoke to Oleksiy in Berlin about surveillance, Harun Farocki and representation of Chornobyl on-screen.

KG: You mentioned that you finished the film three days before the screening. How did you feel watching it with an audience?

OR: Strangely, I keep seeing new things in the footage that I’ve seen a thousand times. For a long time I thought I knew every frame by heart, everything there. But I knew also when we were finishing post-production—there were even small details and figures I hadn’t noticed.

KG: I felt like everyone was having a different experience at the screening—because the gaze is quite non-hierarchical, in terms of what you focus on. As a viewer you are doing the work of the director.

OR: Yeah, because it’s mostly wide-angle shots, especially when nothing is going on. People’s view of space starts to wander.

KG: How did you go from your first film [also about Chornobyl] to this film? 

OR: I’d been doing research about the Chornobyl Zone for quite some time. And we were travelling there as often as I could. There was some plan to do a film but I didn’t know exactly what it would be. And then in 2022, this whole thing happened, and then it became the subject of the film. The Russians took over Chornobyl and then they got kicked out of the Kiev region, so it was liberated. And we went to the Chornobyl Zone soon after the liberation—not with the plan to make a film, but I joined a project documenting war crimes, with different people and filmmakers, journalists documenting war crimes in different areas, at different times. I was focused on Chornobyl and started to do in-depth interviews with the survivors and witnesses and workers of the repair plant who were held captive there. I interviewed a lot of them—and the way this project works is we collect data and we filmed the footage and then we as filmmakers use this in our work, but the same body of data is transferred to the legal team of the project, and they analyse it from the point of view of prosecuting war crimes as they specialize in international criminal court cases. Some of the workers told me they were operating the cameras and recording the footage and this was very interesting. I immediately wanted to see it.

We managed to convince the Office of the Prosecutor General that this footage should be shared with us. Thousands of hours of raw material—they had analysed it from their perspective. I think they told us it was kind of an exception, or that they never do this. They never share this kind of footage with filmmakers.

KG: What they do is very far removed from a film festival or art house cinema.

OR: Yes, I agree. But at the same time I see it as a kind of forensic film. It’s very challenging to watch but we don’t do a lot of creative stuff, apart from the editing and the sound. The concept is to turn this kind of mountain of footage into something viewable—visible. It’s a condensed extract. It’s experimental but also very straightforward.

KG: No bells and whistles. I was interested in your own tastes as a filmgoer, you said yesterday that you love boring films. 

OR: I was partly joking, but only partly. And I mean it in a good way. I mean something that is not Hollywood. Not narrative. For the filmmakers that are important to me, there was one particular encounter in the body of work of a filmmaker called Harun Farocki. He was in Berlin and passed away 10 years ago. He has a project called ‘labour in a single shot’—and I was part of this workshop. It made me think a lot about the possibilities of film and how films can be made outside of what was normally considered to be a filmmaking process. It was a very simple assignment that they did, right? But at the same time very difficult. The idea was to film labour. Any sort of labour for three minutes and then we had conversations about what we thought. Then I started to take filmmaking more seriously.

KG: That’s interesting because with Special Operation I felt like I was watching work happening—even if the definition of work is a bit blurry—both in the filming, because the camera operators are working, and in the soldiers in front of the camera, who are also working.

OR: Yeah I agree this labour here is present, but it’s marginal. Harun’s body of work is so vast and also includes found footage. I’m not saying this is a Farockian film. One of his famous films is called Videograms of the Revolution where there’s sound footage and this explicit analytical apparatus as part of the film. Farocki’s work—it was very much, a lot about, a lot about what he called operational image, yeah, and how technology, how technology starts to produce images and technology starts to create a cinema itself.

KG: I found it interesting that surveillance cameras are associated with control, which is overturned in your film, turning the surveillance back on the system. Were you thinking about that?

OR: Yes, of course. I think it’s basically a film in a way about the power of the gaze. The moment I saw the footage for the first time is that this is really kind of about this dynamic of power and reciprocity of the occupation. So, basically, there’s this military force that takes over this place and it kind of declares itself in charge of the place and they are holding everyone captive there and they’re controlling everyone. But they also are under surveillance by these people. And this also acquires some form of power over their perpetrators. Even though it was very ephemeral and it’s only because the footage survived and it was turned into something else that this power materialized in a way.

KG: I was interested in your comments about the intention to dehumanize the Russian soldiers, and the ethical implications of this.

OR: I don’t think this film humanizes the soldiers in any way. But I’m not convinced by the concept of humanization or dehumanization, because humans, like, what is a human? I mean, people are dehumanizing themselves all the time with what they are doing, and, like, I don’t see being human necessarily as some kind of elevated entity. People are inhumans themselves most of the time, especially at war, for example.

KG: It’s interesting that Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah is also being shown as part of Berlinale—which shows an undercover recording of a Nazi officer admitting to crimes. The question of consent is a topic people get so sensitive about.

OR: People from other contexts are not so sensitive to the situation of war. There’s this fundamentalism with regard to consent and privacy when it comes to documentary film. I don’t know how people make films in places like Germany where you have to obtain every permission if you are filming in the street. Maybe I’m bullshitting. But that’s impossible. It just criminializes every documentary film and for no reason, really. We don’t have this in Ukraine. But in the case of forensic evidence of abuse they have been caught, basically—documented. This is forensic footage.

KG: This is an ongoing conflict and you said before that it helped your mental health to create this film. Can you please talk a little bit about that? 

OR: When the invasion started it was basically the question for more or less everyone in Ukraine of what should we do to resist, to use our skills to somehow join the resistance. I was able to use my skills within filmmaking. It also overlaps kind of with forensic work but also journalism in a kind of investigative area even though I’m not a journalist. My colleagues are journalists. And I still think this is probably the most useful thing I could be doing. And this is why making this film is also essentially important. To say that this was helpful for me to kind of have a sense of doing something.

KG: Who do you want to see this film? 

OR: I can answer by saying who is probably going to watch this film. A documentary film audience. Then it’s also important for people involved with forensics and law. And maybe also in technology, for example in the nuclear industry. I’d be interested for them to see it. I know it’s not a group of people but I would be curious for them to see it. It’s kind of a technological film, made with the participation of humans. But it’s still not entirely human.

KG: How do you feel about something like the TV show Chernobyl, which has been a huge commercial hit. How do you feel about the appetite towards these kind of things as entertainment? 

OR: I have to say, strangely, I really enjoyed Chernobyl. I mean… It’s good. Mainly because I was expecting something really horrible, so my bar of expectations was really low. And I thought this is going to be really cheesy. I think they did a great job, really. And there’s also, apart from that, there’s a bunch of lesser-known films about Chernobyl lately and previously, and documentaries too, made from 1986 and onwards. Most of them were documentaries made in Ukraine, which means that almost no one has seen them.  Some of them are really good, some of them are not, but it doesn’t matter, in a way. And I hope there are going to be more.

KG: You keep the context of the Chernobyl disaster and occupation quite brief at the beginning of the film, why is that? 

OR: At some point I thought that it was not really necessary and maybe not really super important, that this would focus maybe their attention unnecessarily on something else. Frankly, this is not really a film about Chernobyl. It’s a film about the Russian army. And, yes, of course it is kind of essential, the fact that this is in Chernobyl. But what’s even more essential—what made this film happen—is that in this footage we just get a chance to look at, to watch Russian soldiers and what they do in this kind of uninterrupted documentary form for a very long time.