Bernard-Henri Lévy tells us about everyday heroes – L’Express

During his wanderings along the front, in a hospital, devastated towns, the ruins of a pizzeria, a military base, the synagogue of Dnipro or the wind turbines on the Black Sea, BHL delivers images of exceptional intensity , which describe a war of attrition, where ammunition is running out and men too but where the determination of the Ukrainian people remains intact. Even if, in the West, public fatigue with the conflict in Ukraine is finally setting in. “It is true that the risk is that fewer and fewer of us understand that it is the same game that is being played in Israel and Ukraine, and that opinions think that they have no place in their intelligence and in their emotion than for a war”, fears Bernard-Henri Levy. For L’Express, he comments on half a dozen photos taken from his documentary which will be broadcast on November 14 at 9:05 p.m. on France 2.

“I am with General Bogomolov, and we are two kilometers from Bakhmout. This scene takes place at the beginning of August, and his car has just been targeted by this drone of Iranian origin that we are holding in our hands. This high-ranking officer , in charge of the Eastern Front, was one of the heroes of the Battle of Kiev. I also saw him among his men, a front-line general giving confidence to the troops, showing his detailed knowledge of the terrain and the conditions of the battle, a true strategist and formidable tactician. That day, General Bogomolov was very angry with the Western experts who were beginning to complain that the counter-offensive was not going fast enough, that that was not how he must be done, that they would go about it differently… He is very, very annoyed and confides to me that the operations are taking place as they should and, above all, as they can given the pace of arms deliveries by the allies : ‘We have our priorities, our constraints, starting with the economy of our forces and the limitation of our means. Rather than criticizing us, why not give us the weapons and ammunition we need to win?’ Would he say things today in the same terms? I don’t know.”

“This is what remains of the pizzeria in Kramatorsk, a town in the east which had 150,000 inhabitants before the invasion. On June 27, two missiles pulverized this restaurant frequented by residents who did not flee, the staff humanitarian organizations and journalists. With Marc Roussel and our team, we were regulars. Just the day before, we came there for dinner. We know the place by heart. The kitchen… The pizza oven… The location of the tables the coolest, at the start of summer… All that exploded, in the middle of the night, a few hours before we came back, filmed this rubble and Marc took this photo. The destruction of this pizzeria, which left at least 13 dead, including the writer Victoria Amelina, and dozens of injured, is not the result of chance. It was civilians who were targeted. I am categorical. There is nowhere The slightest military objective is nearby. No ammunition depot, no command center, no anything within ten kilometers around. Those who fired these precision missiles have sent a message. Whose ? To journalists. To humanitarians, these everyday heroes. And to the writers who, like Victoria Amelina, and to put it like Sartre, ‘meddle in what does not concern them’.”

“We are in Yahidne, a village halfway between Belarus and Kiev. The Russians arrived in March 2022. They rounded up the 350 inhabitants and sequestered them for twenty-seven days and twenty-seven nights in the cellars of school, in conditions of promiscuity and hygiene that are truly terrifying. These three young girls are 17 years old. They take us to the site of their ordeal. They show us, engraved on a wall, the countdown of the days and nights . They tell how people around them were dying of suffocation. One of them told me about an old lady, perhaps an aunt, or a grandmother. For twenty-four hours, she thought she was just asleep. And it was when the smell started to spread that she knew she was dead. Later, they will tell me their plans. They will talk about the future of the “Ukraine and the role they dream of playing there. These twenty-seven days have transformed them. They too are everyday heroines.”

“We are near Bakhmut and we are heading towards Klichtchiïvka, one of the areas where the fighting was, at the time, the most intense. These men left on the front line to occupy a trench still held the day before by the Russians. We are very close to the front. But a front which is not fixed, as in the war books. A moving front. In perpetual recomposition. With units which, on both sides, infiltrate behind enemy lines . Everywhere, charred vehicles, sheared trees, incessant explosions. This is where the three Russian soldiers interviewed in the film were taken prisoner. In particular the one who says he was sold by his commander, 25,000 rubles , to a private company of mercenaries. I had never heard such a story. It says a lot about the state of moral decomposition of the Russian army…”

“This synagogue, in Dnipro, is only part of the largest Jewish community center in the world. Nothing like it exists, neither in France, nor in the United States, nor elsewhere. And the first thing that, in entering, what strikes me is the vitality, the intensity of Jewish life. Yes, we are in the heart of this Ukraine which was one of the theaters of the Shoah by bullets. And what strikes you is that there is one of the most intense Jewish lives in Europe – with a fervor in prayer and study that is rarely found elsewhere in the Western world. I also wanted, by devoting a long sequence, take head-on the argument of those who refuse to take sides with Ukraine. Ukrainian anti-Semitism… The pogroms… Babi Yar… We hear this all the time from hypocrites who don’t want to say that “They’re just afraid of Putin… And so I decided to deal with the subject in this film and to do it by getting to the bottom of things. Obviously, Ukraine was that. And the crime is, of course, irremissible . But Ukraine, since the Maidan, is also one of the countries where the work of memory and thought on its own criminal memory has been carried out with the most probity. Zelensky’s election was a decisive step on this path to repentance. But there are other signs. More evidence.”

“It’s a reality that is obvious everywhere: the number of mutilated people is dizzying. This scene takes place near Lviv, in the west of the country. We are in a hospital, the Superhumans Center, which equips penguins, transplants arms, repairs skulls. There are volunteer doctors there, from all over the world. And these people of seriously injured people whom you see playing ping-pong, doing exercises, swimming, learning to use their prosthesis, but who have only one idea: to be able, once repaired, to go out and return to the fire. Heroism, again. Grandeur of these broken faces who will return to the first or second line. The end word of this insane disinterestedness? They are inhabited by something bigger than them. To the question ‘Why are you fighting?’, we all answer: ‘my country and Europe’. Of which everyone has the feeling of holding the border and the line.”

“On this military base, near Kharkiv, foreign volunteers. They form the Trident Group. No government support. Minimal pay for the men. Just professionals, upset by this atrocious war, who came from Great Britain, from Australia, New Zealand or France to teach young recruits the art of first aid, the technique of street fighting that will one day be carried out in the cities of Crimea and drone warfare. These boys are magnificent . They understood that anti-liberal and anti-democratic forces have launched a major offensive that begins in Ukraine but which, if not stopped, could become global. And there they are! They hopped on a plane to Poland, and They are there, on the ground, alongside their Ukrainian brothers in arms! They are pure freedom fighters.

The best of the heritage of the International Brigades in Spain. And what do we talk about in our spare time? By Volodymyr Zelensky, Plutarch’s character, who entered the legend alive. But also Commander Massoud or the Kurdish heroes of Rojava with whom they also served and whom we admire. An International of Fraternity…”

Bernard-Henri Lévy is a normalien, associate professor of philosophy, writer, director of “La Règle du Jeu”, and editorialist. He is co-directing with Marc Roussel his third documentary on the conflict, after “Why Ukraine” (2022) and “Slava Ukraini” (2023).