Russia's Brutality Seen Through the Lens of 2024's Best Film

"Intercepted" is worth an immediate watch.

Intercepted is a 2024 film by the Ukrainian-Canadian director Oksana Karpovych. It combines photographs of Ukrainian cities and villages destroyed by the Russians, with audio intercepts of cell phone calls between Russian soldiers and their relatives back in Russia (these calls were intercepted by Ukrainian intelligence).

The movie is not for the fainthearted, but it shows Russian depravity and inhumanity while exhibiting the many war crimes the regime and its foot soldiers have committed. One especially frightening element is the way the mothers, wives, girlfriends and sisters goad the fighting men to commit war crimes, to kill innocent civilians, to loot anything they can, to torture. Often, the relatives and the soldiers become collaborators in the genocide. Witness, the following exchange between a mother and son, as they discuss their mutual love of torture. It starts with the son talking about a captured Ukrainian.

After hearing her son confess to torture, the mother has but one question to ask:

Her son pipes up:

The kind-hearted mother’s response?

And this is not the only example of family members enjoying, reveling, celebrating the brutal murder of soldiers and civilians of all ages. There are countless intercepts of relatives telling their soldiers to fight with utmost brutality to wipe out the NATO bio labs, or whatever myths they absorbed through the Kremlin-RussianTV-Tulsi-Gabbard pipeline, begging them to wipe out all Ukrainians.

So when people talk about a potential peace deal between Putin and Ukraine, I think — how? How can people like this, people who have so little to give to the world except a penchant for sadism and annihilation — how can people like these ever be trusted to be peaceful neighbors?