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In the dying days of the Soviet Union, there was much talk of “Afghan syndrome” within Russia. Thousands of veterans of the ill-fated war in Afghanistan were traumatised, angry and denied any sort of aftercare. A mass epidemic of untreated PTSD was let loose on the streets. After watching this horrifying documentary, it’s hard not to conclude that the country’s late-80s experience of the aftermath of conflict might have been simply a taster of what was to come.
Some of the interviewees in Ben Steele’s film speak anonymously. Many show their faces but don’t give names. A few are happy to be named in full, presumably on the grounds that the Russian state has already done its worst. All are impossibly, heartbreakingly brave.
Shortly after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, a flurry of small anti-war demonstrations took place in Russia. There’s footage of one here; at the heart of it is a young man called Artyom. According to his then girlfriend (now wife) Sasha, Artyom “lived for poetry and creativity”. In the UK at the time, people marvelled at the courage of those undaunted dissidents; not only staring into the Putinist abyss but daring to hold its gaze. This is what happened to them. We see Artyom again, now in custody and apologising for his defiance. They tortured and raped him, says Sasha. His gaunt features and despairing eyes tell their own story.
So much for the resistance, then. What this film dares to do is examine what happens to Russians who, reluctantly, tried to conform and joined the war effort. The zero of the title has two meanings. It’s a noun – the “Zero Line” is the zone of conflict with the enemy. But it’s also a verb, a piece of military slang. It refers to the increasingly common practice of executing one’s own troops.
When soldiers attempt to desert, they are zeroed. When a group of conscripted convicts arrive on the frontline, they are zeroed, their bank cards taken and their accounts emptied. When soldiers are severely wounded, they are zeroed – and it begins, almost, to look like a kindness. “He had five kids,” one ex-soldier explains of a particular kill. There is compensation for the dead. But, he continues, “There’s no payment for a vegetable. So we put him down, like a dog.” Early in the film, the same man suggests that “your adversary is in front of you. But your enemy is your commander behind you.” It quickly becomes easy to see what he means. The Russian army seems almost completely lawless.
And so it goes on. It’s an oddly even-tempered itemising of almost routine horror. There are “meat storms” (the phrase refers to the tactic of simply throwing an overwhelming volume of soldiers at certain battles). These can, in simple, arithmetical terms, be successful. But the numbers involved are jaw-dropping; the kind of statistics you have to check twice to make sure you’ve read correctly. For example, every day in 2025 an estimated 900 to 1,500 Russians were killed or wounded. Every day. The casual disregard for human life is chillingly reminiscent of Stalin.
Given the sheer scale of this carnage, it’s hard to imagine that most families in Russia won’t eventually be affected. The documentary also touches upon the eerie banality of life on the home front. The propaganda broadcasts on the news. The recruitment films in which cute kids wait on station platforms, longing to jump into the arms of their heroic fathers. The intention of these films is, presumably, to personalise the war but, as is generally the case with any boosterism surrounding authoritarian regimes, the actual effect is dark absurdity shading into nausea.
The genuinely personal touches come, inevitably, from the resistance – and most of them are unimaginably harrowing. The young man in the Joy Division T-shirt whose wife was sent to a penal colony for condemning the real-life atrocity exhibition in Bucha. The special needs teacher (and dancer) who was conscripted and whose fellow recruits discovered pictures of him performing – their response was to tie him to a tree, beat him with batons and urinate on him. He sliced his arms with a broken coffee jar to escape his tormentors.
As the credits roll, there’s a statement that feels almost comically superfluous: “We approached the Russian government for comment but have not yet had a response.” It’s a legal formality, but really, does it matter what the Russian government says? We’re surely past that point and the result is a film that is as important as it is difficult to watch; a piece of work that feels less like documentary-making and more like evidence-gathering.
This war has brutalised more than just Ukrainians; it has done its best to obliterate gentleness, kindness and sensitivity among its secondary victims, the Russian population themselves. The war will eventually end but for the people in this film, it will never truly be over. The Zero Line will arrive on the home front and, as in the late 80s, the trauma will endure. As Sasha plaintively puts it as she travels to visit Artyom in prison: “I love Russia. But Russia doesn’t seem to love me.”
