Oleg Sentsov, the filmmaker-soldier who shoots down Russian helicopters

Ukrainian director Oleg Sentsov, now integrated into a special forces unit, in Sloviantsk, Donbass, Ukraine, June 27, 2022. LAURENT VAN DER STOCKT FOR “THE WORLD”

Serene, determined, Oleg Sentsov is transformed, over the course of the war, into a real soldier. These days, he patrols the “grey zone”, as he calls it, of the Bakhmut and Lysytchansk regions, as part of a unit whose mission is to shoot down enemy helicopters. “They fly very low. So when a helicopter appears above the trees, says Sentsov, we only have two, three seconds maximum to fire a rocket. »

Oleg Sentsov, the Ukrainian filmmaker who was an icon of Maidan’s “dignity revolution” and then, for five years, one of Vladimir Putin’s most famous political prisoners in Russia, winner of the 2018 Sakharov Prize, is committed on February 24 in territorial defence, this army of volunteers who joined the Ukrainian forces in the face of Russian aggression. Found by Le Monde, after two weeks of conflict, near a checkpoint in the kyiv region, the world-famous artist gives this time, after four months of war, go to Kramatorsk, in the province of Donetsk . Sentsov left the territorial defense, “too boring to [son] taste”, to join the special forces.

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From the first days of the war, the Ukrainian filmmaker and activist from Crimea had shown signs of impatience to go into battle. After a week manning a checkpoint, Sentsov, 45, with no previous military experience, became deputy commander of the unit commanded by Colonel Arkadich, and joined a mobile territorial defense group that roamed the first front line. around kyiv, then a priority target of a Russian army which ultimately failed to conquer the Ukrainian capital.

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“Maximum of specialties”

Oleg Sentsov now roams the front lines of Donbass with Stinger missiles. His special forces unit roams shelled fronts without respite and sometimes infiltrates the no man’s land between Ukrainian and Russian lines to carry out reconnaissance missions and try to “trap a helicopter”. The artist takes the war very seriously: he has just returned from a training course in the west of the country, firing Stugna and Javelin anti-tank rocket launchers. “In war, to be useful, he notes, you have to acquire as many specialties as possible. »

Like many Ukrainian fighters encountered since the February 24 invasion, and unanimously since the end of the battle of kyiv and the first Russian military failure, Oleg Sentsov is part of a long war logic. “The only question is ‘To be or not to be’ [Etre ou ne pas être]. This is a war for Ukraine’s survival,” he said in March. “I hate predictions, but I think it will take at least two to three years to liberate all Ukrainian territories,” he comments today in Kramatorsk.

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