Russian-Canadian filmmaker Anastasia Trofimova returns to tell the war in first-person as with the conflicts in Iraq, Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo. A chance encounter with a man on a train, a Ukrainian named Ilya, – who leaves his family to go to war for Russia – pushes her to join his unit on their harrowing journey to the front. For an entire year, without any permission, she documents an army of confused and disillusioned young soldiers, often struggling to understand why they are fighting. Eventually, everyone realizes that what they heard about the war in the Russian media is false, and doubting the purpose of that pointless war, they end up fighting just to survive.