Author: Kateryna Gorodnycha
Anastasia Trofimova, who is touring the world with her work about “our boys,” gave an interview to Russian journalist Ekaterina Gordeeva.
When Anastasia Trofimova's documentary Russians at War was first screened at the Venice Film Festival in 2023, the Ukrainian cultural community organized protests. When the film was announced at the largest film festival in Canada after Venice, diplomats and politicians joined the protest. In particular, Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland. The documentary was shot with money from Canadian public funds, which raised questions about how it happened that the government financed a pro-Russian film.
At the time, Freeland was accused of protesting without having seen the film. We wrote about how the Canadian and American media were outraged by the Ukrainian protests and were eager to tell how Trofimova and the film festival's management were threatened with violence. And they “just wanted to show the soldiers of the other side.” Of course, American and Canadian journalists were curious about this exclusive! Especially since the Canadian producers of the film insisted in all interviews that the film was about the fact that Russian soldiers do not want to fight at all.
Finally, here is a long (almost three-hour) interview with the film's author, Anastasia Trofimova, by Russian journalist and blogger Ekaterina Gordeeva. If anyone else (just in case) had doubts about the propaganda nature of Russians at War, forget it. In short interviews with various TV channels and at press conferences at festivals, she could still disguise herself, but here, everything came out.
The vocabulary, intonations, and narratives leave no options. Even without watching the film Russians at War, one can unmistakably see how ineptly (for a former RT employee) Anastasia exposes her true nature. Even the Russian interviewer, Gordeeva, cannot resist, sometimes trying to demonstrate to her interviewee that she is spreading Kremlin propaganda. But the tactic of “playing the fool” helps her a lot. And “it's all politics,” while she is talking about “human stories.”
Throughout the interview, Trofimova says “ukrAintsy” (ukrainians) with an emphasis that is not typical of Ukrainians. Gordeeva asks her why she says it that way and whether she realizes that only Putin's propagandists say it that way.
This is for you to start with so that you can immediately get a boost of energy and roughly imagine how we felt watching this endless video.
Before telling you about other places where Anastasia makes remarkable omissions or Kremlin definitions, let's start with a tour of Trofimova's biography.
When she was 10 years old, her mother emigrated from Russia (Moscow) to Canada. Her father, a Kazakh, has always lived and still lives in Kazakhstan. He has little or no contact with his daughter. From the very first day her mother brought her overseas, little Nastya dreamed of returning to Moscow. Among her nostalgic images, she mentions Moscow's “Khrushchev” buildings.
She happily begins to describe her love for Russia. Ekaterina Gordeeva cautiously asks her if her childhood brain has not drawn a non-existent “beautiful Russia of the past” (our wording, not Gordeeva's - Ed.). Trofimova responds in the same way as she would to any counter-argument to any question from the interviewer: “Maybe so, but still no.”
Trofimova decides that she needs to be prepared to go to her dream country. First, she has to get a Canadian education. She graduated from the university with a degree in communication and political science. Remember this tweet, just in case. From now on, she will answer every uncomfortable question that it's all politics, and she doesn't want to figure it out, she wants to understand the fate of ordinary people.
So, she got her degree. Anastasia packed a suitcase and bought a ticket to Europe, from where she was going to get to Russia. But she went... to Kosovo. She saw a bunch of different soldiers there, wondered why there were so many troops, and “just stayed there for a year.” But “just” meant that yesterday's graduate wanted to make a documentary about “corruption in international peacekeeping missions in Kosovo.”
Her movie never came out. Probably, she hadn't grown up to be a filmmaker at that time. Instead, Trofimova, a “tourist” turned into a “guide” for international students, taking them “around Serbian enclaves because no one else wants to do it.”
Do you also think that somewhere around this very moment, Anastasia should have developed certain connections and contacts with certain authorities?
And then there was more. Trofimova met an Italian journalist who “convinced” her to go to Lebanon and make a film about Hezbollah and Palestinian refugees. “With her own money”. At this point, Gordeeva is sincerely interested in where Nastia got the money to make such a trip.
“I earned it,” Trofimova says and smiles shyly, "I worked in production at the university."
So, 23-year-old Anastasia traveled to Lebanon three times to visit Palestinian camps. For the salary of a production assistant and a university professor, I remind you. At this point, the editor of the Tell Hordeeva project shows a photo of her not with refugees, by the way.
After making this film (Twelve Palestines), Anastasia (surprise, surprise!) finds herself working in Russia Today's documentary department. She films military conflicts around the world, even where, in her words, “there are no Russian interests,” for example, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In May 2014, just after the annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of hostilities in Donbas, while already working with Russia Today, Trofimova finally returned to Russia and went to Donetsk. As a cameraman, she was accompanied by “Dr. Lisa,” who was then taking Ukrainian children to Russia.
This was followed by six years of cooperation with Russia Today (from 2014 to 2020), during which Trofimova made five films in Iraq, three in Syria, one in Lebanon, and one, as we already know, in the Congo.
Anastasia recalls her time working for Margarita Simonian's channel with fondness. She says that it was a “golden era” for the documentary film department. And especially for her. Because she “had a privileged position because of her dual citizenship (Russian and Canadian) and her English language skills.”
In 2020, Anastasia “amicably” resigned from Russia Today because “there were rumors that the free ride was over and that she would have to shoot only what was necessary.”
So Trofimova started working as a news editor in the Moscow office of a Canadian TV channel. In 2022, the Russian authorities revoked the accreditation of Canadian media, and Anastasia continued to freelance as a reporter and translator for other media outlets, such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Sky News.
This is another “tweet” that should be remembered because the interviewer caught her guest several times in “fables” during the three-hour interview. In particular, when talking about how she later got to the military, Trofimova claims that she arrived there by taxi, simply passed the checkpoint, simply (with a large professional camera) went into the house where the Russian military lived, and simply agreed that she would film them. She was not checked or stopped at any checkpoint. Later, in the same way, she took hard drives with materials (16 terabytes on four hard drives) to Russia from the war zone and then to Canada. And at the border, no one checked her or asked what kind of hard drives she was carrying. The journalist had both Russian and Canadian passports.
Gordeeva simply could not believe that her guest was lying so casually.
Gordeeva noted that many people are in Russian prisons, but no one has checked Trofimova anywhere. The author of Russians at War then comes up with a classic phrase that has long since become a meme: “What am I in for?”
Gordeeva reads to her guest her own post, which Trofimova published on social media in early 2022, in which she expresses a clear anti-Putin position. So there was definitely something to check her for. If Anastasia hadn't had the 'green corridor'.
At the point where Trofimova mentions Canadian, American, and British media outlets, the interviewer asks her, “Weren't you under suspicion? In Russia, anyone who cooperates with foreign media is always under the radar.” “No,” Nastya replies, ”I wasn't working full-time.”
Well, if only part-time, then there are no questions, right?
And it was after this cooperation with foreigners that our heroine (or rather Gordeeva's heroine) went to shoot Russians at War.
The main question that has been on everyone's mind since the film's release is: “How did she get there?” Gordeeva asks Trofimova this question at the beginning of the interview.
So Trofimova tells the same fantastic story.
She traveled to different places and couldn't film anything. Then, suddenly, she met “Father Frost” on the train, a guy in a military uniform with a Christmas costume over it. She started talking to him. Immediately, she took out her big professional camera and filmed the interview. It was Ilya, a “DNR fighter”. He fought in the Russian army.
According to her legend, he brought her to his commanders in the 57th Brigade. Everyone was like, “No problem, of course, film everything!”
No, no, Nastya was not a foreign media “watcher” before this trip after working for Russia Today. She was just a fixer, just a translator.
No, no, Nastya was not assigned to the unit to shoot a propaganda film for the West (because in Russia, they simply keep silent about this film - they do not oppress it, but they do not protect it either; the goal is different). She was just “lucky” again.
At one point in the interview, Trofimova makes a mistake. And it seems to us that this was the only true moment. Talking about the positions where she filmed, she said: “where I served”.
Trofimova's entire story about the characters in this documentary is simply permeated with narratives such as “everyone is to blame for the war,” “it's all politics,” and “Putin was not the only one interested in this war.” Most importantly, she constantly emphasizes that the main conflict is between Ukrainians.
Gordeyeva counters: “But you do realize that they all lived perfectly well until 2014, and suddenly they started treating each other like this. Do you think that they came to this attitude toward each other on their own, without propaganda?”
“Of course,” Anastasia agrees, ”there was propaganda! On both sides.”
To prove that everyone is covered in the same world, she tells us about her discovery in Belgorod. In 2022. The stories of Ukrainians from Kupiansk who fled with the occupiers when the Ukrainian Armed Forces liberated the city.
The Russian army, in her telling, is not tied to the war at all. They are “ordinary people doing their job”. She even calls the war a “competition for territory.”
For Anastasia Trofimova, the war appears as a computer game: soldiers fighting soldiers - who kills whom. The part where Russia kills Ukrainian civilians does not exist in her mind. At least, that's the impression I get from this interview.
In the beginning, Trofimova furiously denied politics, the political component of the war, but in the end, she suddenly began to pour out her “political analysis.”
Of course, after Trump and Vance's statements, we are already used to the idea that “Zelensky is to blame for the war,” but here is another quote from the author of the film, which was accepted at international film festivals:
So, make no mistake: the war is not because Putin attacked. It's because Zelenskyy sent Ukrainians to fight solely to stay in power himself.
It is a pity that “artist Trofimova” did not give this interview at the moment when the film was just beginning to be welcomed at respected international film platforms. Our filmmakers who protested against the screening of this propaganda would have had many more arguments for the organizers. But in general, according to Trofimova, Venice was a great event.
The description of the plot of Russians at War states that the author “reveals something that is far from propaganda and labels imposed by the East or the West: in fact, the Russian army is in a mess, soldiers are frustrated and often struggle to understand what they are fighting for.”
This is how the film was described during its premiere in Venice.
In this interview, Trofimova also tells us how great the technical support in the Russian army is. And that the soldiers will not stop on their own. They are ready to fight. For their fallen comrades.
It doesn't match the description of the message that the author allegedly intended in her film, does it?
The same Venice Film Festival also screened a Ukrainian film about the Russian-Ukrainian war, "Song of a Slowly Burning Land" by Olha Zhurba. Gordeeva asked Anastasia how she perceived the film. The never-so-propagandist Trofimova expressed her dissatisfaction with the selection committee's inclusion of such “blatant propaganda” in the program.
We apologize for such a long text with a detailed paraphrase of the Russian propagandist's theses. But it seems to us that in the fight against Russian propaganda, which they promote in the West, we all need strong arguments. Because, as we can see, Western viewers (especially cultural figures and journalists) who are not immersed in the context have to be provided with evidence every time that black is black, and white is white. Nothing is obvious to them. That's why we have lost many “battles” for cancelling Russian propaganda. Both soft and bold.
