The young men we see in this documentary about the capture of a village called Andriivka by the 3rd Assault Brigade of the Ukrainian army are a snapshot of the country’s working class. One is a lorry driver, their commander previously worked in a warehouse and a third is a polytechnic student studying electronics. They are virtually all in their early twenties and all volunteered to fight the Russian invasion. The oldest man we meet is 48. Most of them will be dead within months of being filmed.

Mstyslav Chernov accompanied the unit as it fought the last 2000 metres through a narrow strip of forest and his film supplements his own footage with videos shot by the soldiers’ helmet cameras. The opening couple of minutes lets you know what is to follow. We see a Ukrainian unit under attack and unable to escape. It loses two men.

The landscape in which they are fighting resembles the blasted woodlands of World War One. The fields are mud and denuded trees while the men are facing not just Russian bullets and shells, but their drones as well. Virtually every inch of the battlefield is visible to the commanders on either side.

When the Ukrainians refer to the Russians they only word they ever use is rendered as “motherfuckers” in the translation, an understandable way of describing people who have come to your country to seize or destroy it. We only see one Russian properly on camera, a captured major from one of the Muslim regions of Russia or its client states who are providing Putin’s cannon fodder. When he’s asked why they are there he mutters “I don’t know why we’re here.” The Ukrainians are clear about what they are fighting for. They want to get rid of the invaders who have seized 20% of their country and destroy what they can’t hold. They want to go back to civilian life and try to pick up where they left off. They fight but they prefer not to.

2000 Meters to Andriivka is war without heroics or glamour. We accompany a group of young men as they advance metre by metre past the corpses, through the mud with death always hovering and the screams of the wounded. It is a small scale action for a village which no longer exists but which bisects a Russian supply line. This is not war porn like Alex Garland’s recent film Warfare. This is the full horror of modern war fighting and mercifully the closest most of us will ever get to experiencing it.

Oddly enough the film reminded me of Elem Klimov’s Soviet masterpiece Come and See, a brutally visceral account of partisans fighting Nazi invaders. A difference is that while we know the Germans were eventually defeated, Putin seems determined to keep killing Russians in vast numbers until the Ukrainians are worn down.

Andriivka was retaken by the Russians. It is now little more than a pile of rubble surrounded by trenches and minefields. The film is a Ukrainian telling of the story, but it is more a record of what the country’s soldiers are going through than propaganda. I  doubt that anyone looking at the horror and futility of the battle will be inspired to sign up for military service. These men are reconciled to death and yet Ukraine continues to resist against overwhelming odds at the price of losing its bravest and most self-sacrificing young people.