A year ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin introduced a full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine.
It was a dramatic and consequential escalation of Putin’s years-long quest to rebuild the Russian empire, and was met with fierce Ukrainian resistance and foreign backlash.
Over the past year, Russia’s attack turned more than 8 million Ukrainians into refugees, prompted the United States to accuse Russia of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and reignited fears of a nuclear conflict.
At FRONTLINE, we have abundant faithful journalistic resources over the past 12 months to chronicle this evolving struggle. In documentaries, interactives, written histories, and in-depth interview collections, we investigate Putin’s grievances against the West and what led to his invasion of Ukraine, tested the ramifications of war, and investigated the brutal price he inflicted on Ukrainian civilians.
With our reporting partner, The Associated Press, we documented more than 650 incidents involving possible war crimes in Ukraine in the year since the Russian invasion began, adding more than 220 direct attacks on civilians, more than 60 attacks on medical facilities and nearly 40 attacks involving children.
On the first anniversary of the invasion, the war continues, as do our paintings with their impact.
20 Days in Mariupol, told from the attitude of Ukrainian-born director and AP video journalist Mstyslav Chernov, follows him and his colleagues to the early days of the Russian siege of Mariupol as they captured what would become some of the war-defining photographs.
“We went to Mariupol not with the goal of making a documentary, but at the same time to report on what was going on,” Chernov said. the citizens of the city, one that I hope will help the audience perceive the scale of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the horrors that spread in Mariupol. “
The documentary, which was produced and edited by Michelle Mizner and will air on PBS this fall, had its world premiere at Sundance last month and will screen at CPH:DOX, the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, in March. And last week, we released an updated edition of Ukraine: Life under Russian Attack, our documentary about first responders and displaced families searching for how Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, came under Russian assault.
You can watch the documentary now to find out how a year of war changed their lives, and you can listen to a verbal exchange that just came out with the filmmakers in a new episode of our FRONTLINE Dispatch podcast.
“The consequences of all those attacks were enormous,” Mani Benchelah, who along with fellow filmmaker Patrick Tombola recently returned to Kharkiv on a reporting trip, told me in the episode.
“The new Ukraine is one where everyone is incredibly close to death,” Raffle said.
To mark the first anniversary of the war, he selected a collection of our similar stories that you can explore now, below. We hope you find this a harsh narrative of how Russia, Ukraine and the world presented themselves here.
Shortly after the Russian invasion began, FRONTLINE and The Associated Press presented this year-long journalistic effort to comprehensively collect, determine and catalog evidence of possible war crimes committed in one of Europe’s largest conflicts since the end of World War II. We documented more than 650 incidents involving potential war crimes on our interactive tracker, and have co-published stories documenting reports of Russian torture, attacks on Ukrainian schools, attacks on hospitals, Russian-led grain smuggling operations, and a trend of “strategic strikes. “and organized brutality” in spaces under the command of one of Putin’s most sensible generals.
In this documentary, first broadcast in August 2022, FRONTLINE chronicles the lives of civilians and first responders in Kharkiv during the first months of the Russian assault. The updated edition of this month’s documentary revisits many of the other people portrayed in the original film, sharing how nearly a year of war has changed their lives, their city and their country. The documentary was filmed, produced and directed in Ukraine by Mani Benchelah and Patrick Tombola with manufacturer Volodymyr Pavlov, with additional direction through Teresa Smith and executive produced through Oscar-nominated filmmakers Ben de Pear and Edward Watts (Para Sama) and Oscar winner Cate Blanchette. Listen to a verbal exchange you just got out with Benchelah and Tombola on The FRONTLINE Dispatch podcast.
This documentary investigated Putin’s clashes with several U. S. presidents. The U. S. was the U. S. citizen, from Bill Clinton to Joe Biden, as he tried to expand Russia’s influence and territory. Based on in-depth conversations with insiders from five U. S. presidential administrations. The U. S. military, former U. S. intelligence chiefs, Russian and U. S. diplomats. and journalists, the film showed how, before launching the war against Ukraine, Putin tested the waters provoking and challenging U. S. presidents in Ukraine. U. S. for 20 years: invaded Georgia, seized Crimea, and interfered in U. S. presidential election. U. S. Filmmaker Michael Kirk and his team, manufacturers Mike Wiser and Vanessa Fica, traced a series of missteps and miscalculations through U. S. presidents. The US attacks culminated in Putin’s February 2022 attack on Ukraine.
More: Watch and read extended interviews of Putin and the presidents with Sec. Antony Blinken, the former U. S. ambassador. Marie Yovanovitch, journalist Julia Ioffe and many others, as a component of the FRONTLINE Transparency Project, are employed in Ukraine as a component of the FRONTLINE Transparency Project.
FRONTLINE, The Associated Press and SITU Research teamed up to conduct a visual investigation of atrocities committed in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, the month-long profession in Russia in 2022. Based on many hours of CCTV, intercepted phone calls and a virtual 3D image. Bucha’s style, Crime Scene: Bucha mapped the extent of the carnage in the city (more than 450 deaths in total) and described in detail how Russian infantrymen were conducting “clearing” operations. The short documentary, which featured a visualization made using a high-resolution three-dimensional dataset from Bucha that was assembled with drone photographs captured through Ukrainian citizen studies organization Jus Talionis, was produced and edited by Jon Nealon, produced and directed in Ukraine by Tom Jennings and Annie Wong. and produced and reported by AP’s Erika Kinetz.
FRONTLINE told the stories of provocative Russians under threat of arrest and incrimination for denouncing or protesting against Russia’s war in Ukraine. an artist facing 10 years in prison for displaying anti-war stickers in a grocery store, a university professor whose parents live in Ukraine, a young woman whose TikToks have gone viral internationally. The documentary also showed how independent bloodhounds in Russia continued to seek the fact about the war, adding the death toll among the country’s soldiers, data that Russia is a state secret. To be more informed about Putin’s crackdown on dissent in Russia, and those who refuse to remain silent, pay attention to a verbal exchange with director and manufacturer Gesbeen Mohammad on The FRONTLINE Dispatch podcast, and read a Q.
As part of FRONTLINE and Associated Press’ broader collaboration to investigate the war, this 90-minute special investigation traced a trend of atrocities in Ukraine and the demanding situations of seeking accountability for Russia. From managers and manufacturers Tom Jennings and Annie Wong, AP global investigative journalist Erika Kinetz and her AP colleagues, the documentary was based on original footage; interviews with Ukrainian citizens and prosecutors, senior government officials, and foreign war crimes experts; and a wealth of never-before-seen evidence, adding reams of hours of surveillance camera footage and thousands of audio recordings of intercepted phone calls made by Russian foot soldiers around the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. Listen to a verbal exchange with Kinetz on The FRONTLINE Dispatch podcast about how she and the film crew uncovered a trend of “strategic violence. “
Conducting new interviews in the days following the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, filmmaker Michael Kirk and his team assessed the events that shaped the Russian leader, the grievances driving him, and how an unfolding conflict with the West erupted into a war in Europe. The documentary’s reporting was also based on dozens of interviews conducted by FRONTLINE over the past five years about Putin’s rise to power. You can explore the interview collection as a component of the FRONTLINE transparency project.