Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine “Risks World War Three”, Says Oscar-Nominated Filmmaker Evgeny Afineevsky, As ‘Freedom On Fire’ Premieres – Venice
deadline.comEvgeny Afineevsky released his Oscar-nominated Netflix documentary Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom in 2015, documenting the Euromaidan protests the previous year in the city of Kyiv that led to the collapse of the Russia-aligned Azarov government and the removal and exile of Putin ally Viktor Yanukovych as Ukraine’s president.
Afineevsky returns to Venice this year with Freedom on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom, a follow-up that details the real stories of the people of Ukraine as they continue their fight against Russia’s invasion of their country.Ahead of the film’s premiere Wednesday, Afineevsky sat with Deadline to explain his urgency to continue to document Ukraine’s struggle, noting that media coverage of the ongoing conflict has died down since the initial invasion in the early part of 2022. “If we continue to neglect what’s going on, we risk this becoming World War Three,” Afineevsky cautions. “[Russia is] openly threatening Europe.
They’re openly threatening politics. I’m fluent in Russian, so I can see the narrative that Putin puts out. They’re openly talking about Putin’s ambition to take different European lands under the Russian empire.
Ukraine is not the final stop, and we must not betray Ukraine by allowing this to happen to them.”Afineevsky is familiar with the playbook, he says, because he saw it first in the coverage of the Syrian crisis, which he documented in his 2017 film Cries from Syria. “For a while, Syria was on top of the news, but then it disappeared,” he notes. “Once a year, the media might return to talking about chemical attacks, but it would always only be once a year when these attacks were happening every month.
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