War's Absurdities: Perception vs. Reality

Given the shameful American sacrifice of Ukraine, there will be few timelier movies than Anna Kryvenko’s upcoming “This House is Undamaged”,. It will be an Orwellian documentary examining the Russian destruction of Mariupol, the Ukrainian city devastated by Putin’s invasion in 2022. Krivenko, a Fellow at the Artist in Residence program, Institute for Advanced Studies at CEU, explains how Russian authorities are rapidly rebuilding and selling properties there while erasing Ukrainian history and creating the big lie of Mariupol as a historically Russian city. Kryvenko, originally from Kyiv, also discusses the parallels between Putin's and Trump's lies about Ukraine, summarizing their fundamental misrepresentation of the truth as a "carnival of hypocrisy."

Here are the five KEEN ON takeaways from our conversation with Kryvenko:

* The Russians are engaged in a systematic erasure of Mariupol's Ukrainian identity, not just through physical reconstruction but through an aggressive propaganda campaign that claims the city was "always Russian." This reconstruction effort began shortly after the city's destruction in 2022.

* Pre-war Mariupol was not characterized by deep Russian-Ukrainian divisions as Russian propaganda claims. According to Kryvenko, language differences weren't a source of conflict before political forces deliberately weaponized them.

* The rebuilding of Mariupol has a dark commercial aspect - Russians are selling apartments in reconstructed buildings, sometimes in properties where the original Ukrainian owners were killed, and marketing them as vacation properties while ignoring the city's tragic recent history.

* There's a humanitarian crisis unfolding as some Ukrainians are being forced to return to occupied Mariupol because they have nowhere else to live, with Kryvenko citing statistics that around 150,000 people returned to occupied territories by the end of 2024.

* The filmmaker is using a unique methodology of gathering evidence through social media content, vlogs, and propaganda materials to document both the physical transformation of the city and the narrative being constructed around it, rather than traditional documentary filming techniques.

Transcript of Anna Kryvenko Interview

Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. As the situation in Ukraine becomes more absurd, it seems as if the lies of Donald Trump and the lies of Vladimir Putin are becoming increasingly similar. Trump has been talking about Zelensky and Ukraine, what is described as a barrage of lies. As CNN reports, Trump falsely called Zelensky a dictator. It's becoming more and more absurd. It's almost as if the whole script was written by some Central European or East Central European absurdist. Meanwhile, the Russians continue to lie as well. There was an interesting piece recently in the Wall Street Journal about Russia wanting to erase Ukraine's future and its past. My guest today, Anna Kryvenko, is a filmmaker. She's the director of an important new movie in the process of being made called "This House Is Undamaged." She's a visual fellow at the Central European University, and she's joining us from Budapest today. Congratulations on "This House is Undamaged." Before we talk specifically about the film, do you agree with my observations that there seems to be an increasingly eerie synergy between the lies coming out of Washington, D.C. and Moscow, between Trump and Putin?

Anna Kryvenko: I think the situation is becoming more crazy and absurd. That's a better word to use in this situation. For me, all of this looks like some carnival of hypocrisy. It's unbelievable that someone can use the word "dictator" in comparison with Vladimir Putin or speaking about this 4% of the people who support Zelensky when he says it's only four persons. It looks completely absurd. And this information comes from Moscow, not from actual Ukrainian statistics.

Andrew Keen: The phrase you use "carnival of hypocrisy" I think is a good description. I might even use that in the title of this conversation. It's almost as if Trump in particular is parodying himself, but he seems so separated from reality that it seems as if he's actually being serious, at least from my position in California. How does it look from your perspective in Budapest? You're originally from Ukraine, so obviously you have a particular interest in this situation.

Anna Kryvenko: I don't even know what to think because it's changing so fast into absurd situations. Every day when I open the news, I'm speaking with people and it looks like some kind of farce. You're expecting that the next day someone will tell you that this is a joke or something, but it's not. It's really hard to believe that this is reality now, but unfortunately it is.

Andrew Keen: Kundera wrote his famous novel "The Joke" as a parody of the previous authoritarian regime in Central Europe. Your new movie, "This House is Undamaged" - I know you are an artist in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University - is very much in that vein. Tell us about the project.

Anna Kryvenko: We're in work in progress. I was doing research in the archives and internet archives. This documentary film will explore the transformation of Mariupol, a Ukrainian city that was destroyed by the Russian invasion in 2022. I will use only archives and found footage materials from people who are in Mariupol now, or who were in Mariupol at the time of invasion, who were actually trying to film what's going on. Sometimes I'll also use propaganda images from Russia, from Russian authorities. In May 2022, Mariupol, after intense fighting, was almost completely destroyed.

Andrew Keen: Tell us the story of Mariupol, this town on the old border of Russia and Ukraine. It's in the southeast of Ukraine.

Anna Kryvenko: It's on the shore of the Azov Sea. It's part of Donetsk region. It was always an industrial city, most known for the Azovstal factory. In 2022, after incredible brutality of Russian war against Ukraine, this strategically important city was almost completely destroyed in May 2022 and was occupied by Russian government. About 90% of buildings were destroyed or demolished in some way.

Andrew Keen: The Russians have essentially leveled the town, perhaps in the same way as the Israelis have essentially destroyed Gaza.

Anna Kryvenko: Exactly. For a lot of people, we have this image of destroyed Mariupol until today. But after these terrible events, the Russians started this big campaign to rebuild the city. Of course, we know it was done just to erase all the scars of war, to erase it from the city's history. They started the reconstruction. Some people who stayed in Mariupol thought they would have new housing since they had no place to live. But business is business - Russian authorities started to sell these apartments to Russian citizens.

Andrew Keen: I'm surprised Trump hasn't got involved. Given his real estate background and his cozy relationship with Putin, maybe Trump real estate will start selling real estate in Mariupol.

Anna Kryvenko: I was thinking the same thing this last week. It was looking like such an absurd situation with Mariupol. But now we are in this business mode again with Ukraine and all the minerals. It's only the economical part of war they look at.

Andrew Keen: He probably would come up with some argument why he really owns Mariupol.

Anna Kryvenko: Yes.

Andrew Keen: Coming back to the Wall Street Journal piece about Russia wanting to erase Ukraine's future and its past - you're originally from Kyiv. Is it the old East Central European business of destroying history and creating a new narrative that somehow conforms to how you want history to have been made?

Anna Kryvenko: I was really shocked at how fast this idea of Russian Mariupol is repeating after two years in Russian media, official and semi-professional blogs, YouTube, and so forth. As a person working with this type of material, watching videos every day to find what I need, I'm listening to these people doing propaganda from Mariupol, saying "we are citizens of the city and it's always been Russian." They're repeating this all the time. Even when I'm hearing this - of course it was always a Ukrainian city, it's completely absurd, it's 100% disinformation. But when you're hearing this repeated in different contexts all the time, you start to think about it.

Andrew Keen: It's the same tactics as Trump. If you keep saying something, however absurd it sounds or is, if you keep saying it enough times, some people at least start believing it. You're not a historian or political scientist, but Mariupol is in the part of Ukraine which had a significant population of Russian-speaking people. Some of the people that you're filming and featuring in your movie - are they Russians who have moved into Mariupol from some other part of Russia, or are they people originally from Mariupol who are somehow embracing their new Russian overlords?

Anna Kryvenko: The people I'm watching on social media, most of them say they're from Mariupol. But you can find journalistic articles showing they're actually paid by the Russian government. It's paid propaganda and they're repeating the same narrative. It's important that they're always repeating "we were born in Mariupol" and "we want the city to be Russian." But of course, you can see it's from the same propaganda book as 2014 with Crimea. They're repeating the same narrative from Soviet times - they just changed "Soviet Union" to "Russia" and "the West" to "European Union."

Andrew Keen: You grew up in Kyiv, so you're familiar with all these current and historical controversies. What's your take on Mariupol before 2020, before it was flattened by the Russians? Was it a town where Russian-speaking and Ukrainian people were neighbors and friends? Were there always deep divisions between the Russian and Ukrainian speaking populations there?

Anna Kryvenko: It's hard to explain because you need to dig deeper to explain the Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking parts of Ukraine. But it was never a problem before Yanukovych became prime minister and then president. It was his strategy to create this polarization of Ukraine - that the western part wants to be part of the European Union and the eastern part wants to be part of Russia because of language, and they cannot live together. But it's not true. For me as a person from Kyiv, from the center of the country, with friends from different parts of Ukraine, it was never a problem. I'm from a Russian-speaking family and have many friends from Ukrainian-speaking families. It was never a question. We were in a kind of symbiotic connection. All schools were in Ukrainian, universities in Ukrainian. We were bilingual. It was not a problem to communicate.

Some of this division came from Yanukovych's connections to Putin and his propaganda. It was important for them to say "we are Russian-speaking people, and because we are Russian-speaking, we want to be part of Russia." But I have friends from Mariupol, and after 2014, when war in eastern Ukraine started and Mariupol was bombed a few times, it became a really good city to live in. There were many cultural activities. I know friends who were originally from Mariupol, studied in Kyiv in theater or visual art, and went back to Mariupol because it was a good place for their art practice. Ukraine is still a bit centralized, with most activity in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, and the big cities, but Mariupol wasn't a city with internal conflict. It's weird that so fast after 2022, people started saying it was always problematic in wanting to be part of Russia. It was never like that.

Andrew Keen: It's as if I lived for a year in Bosnia before the civil war, and it was almost as if ethnicity was invented by the nationalist Serbian regime. It seems as if the Putin regime is doing or has done the same thing in the eastern part of Ukraine.

Anna Kryvenko: Yes.

Andrew Keen: You talk to lots of friends still and you're from Kyiv originally, and obviously your professional life remains focused on the situation. In late February 2025, what's your sense of how Ukrainians are feeling given what Trump is now saying?

Anna Kryvenko: I think a lot of people in Ukraine or Ukrainians abroad are feeling lonely, that they don't have support. Again we are in this situation where you have big deals about Ukraine without Ukraine. You feel like nothing, just an empty space on a map with minerals or sea access. We're just sitting there waiting while they're agreeing on deals. That's the negative layer. But it's important for all Ukrainians to be together and speak about the situation. After Trump's words about the 4% support for Zelensky, there were statistics from last year showing 57-55% support for Zelensky. Today, after these few days, new statistics show 65% support.

Andrew Keen: Zelensky started his political career as a satirical comedian, and it's as if he's participating in his own comedy - as if he's almost paid Trump to promote him. What about the broader take on the US? Obviously Trump isn't all America, but he was just elected a couple of months ago. Are your Ukrainian friends and associates, as well as many people at the Central European University in Budapest, taking this as a message from America itself, or are people able to separate Trump and America?

Anna Kryvenko: This is a hard question because we always know that you have a president or representative figure, but that's not the whole state. I spoke with someone from our university who was in Pennsylvania before the election, and he said all the people were pro-Trump. The logic was really simple - "he's good" and "he will stop this war" - though people sometimes don't even know which war or which country. They're just repeating the same talking points.

Andrew Keen: It's sort of Orwellian in the sense that it's just war and it doesn't really matter who's involved - he's just going to stop it.

Anna Kryvenko: It reminded me of how everyone was repeating about Lukashenko from Belarus that "he's a good manager" and can manage things, and that's why he's still president - not that he's a dictator killing his opponents. They use this to explain why he's good and people choose him. Now with Trump, they say "he's a good businessman," but we can see how this business works. Today, someone from Trump's administration said Zelensky needs to stop being arrogant because Trump is in a bad mood. In what world are we living where this is used as an argument?

Andrew Keen: Coming back to real estate, he probably sees Mariupol as a nice strip on the Black Sea, like Gaza, which he sees as a valuable strip on the Mediterranean for real estate development. I found an interesting piece online about the Russian invasion, "When Buildings Can Talk: The Real Face of Civilian Infrastructure Ruined by Russian Invaders." In a way, your project "This House is Undamaged" is your way of making buildings talk. Is that fair?

Anna Kryvenko: I think it's the best description you can use.

Andrew Keen: Perhaps you might explain how and why.

Anna Kryvenko: This name "This House is Undamaged" might or might not be the final name. For me, it's important because after the first months when it started to be a Russian city, some people were trying to sell apartments just to have some money. The reconstruction started a bit later. They were using video websites like Craigslist. It immediately became Russian, part of Russian territory. People from different Russian regions who saw this opportunity were trying to buy something because prices were so cheap. People needed money to buy a ticket and go to other cities or to relatives. In every advertisement, there was this phrase "this house has no damages" or "this house is undamaged." You had to put it there even if it wasn't true - you could see pictures where one building had a hole, but they were still saying "this house is undamaged."

Andrew Keen: It's just again coming back to the carnival of hypocrisy or the carnival of absurd hypocrisy - you see these completely destroyed homes, and then you have the signs from the Russians saying this house is undamaged.

Anna Kryvenko: It was also interesting why some people from Russia want to buy apartments in Mariupol, in these reconstructed buildings with weird pro-Russian murals - it's like Stalinism. They don't even know where Mariupol is - they think it's somewhere near Crimea, but it's not the Black Sea, it's the Azov Sea, an industrial region. It's not the best place to live. But they think it will be some kind of resort. They're living somewhere in Russia and think they can buy a cheap apartment and use it as a resort for a few months. This is absurd because the city was completely destroyed. You still have mass graves. Sometimes they're selling apartments where they can't even find the owner because the whole family is dead.

On Google Maps, someone made an alternative version where you can see all the buildings that were destroyed, because officially you can't find this information anywhere. People were putting crosses where they knew someone died in a building - entire families. And after this, people are buying their apartments. For me, this is unbearable. You can do research about what you're doing, but people are lazy and don't want to do this work.

Andrew Keen: It comes back to the Journal piece about Russia literally erasing not just Ukraine's past but also its future, creating a culture of amnesia. It's chilling on so many levels. But it's the old game - it's happened before in that part of the world and no doubt will happen again. As a filmmaker, what particular kind of political or aesthetic responsibility do you have? People have been writing - I mentioned Kundera, Russian writers, Gogol - satires of this kind of absurd political power for centuries. But as a filmmaker, what kind of responsibility do you have? How does your form help you make this argument of essentially restoring the past, of telling the truth?

Anna Kryvenko: A lot of filmmakers in Ukraine, with the start of invasion, just brought cameras and started making films. The first goal wasn't to make a film but to document the crimes. My case is different - not only because my family's in Ukraine and I have many friends there and lived there until my twenties. For the last ten years, since the Maidan events in 2013-2014, I started working with archive and found footage material. This is my methodology. For me, it's not important to go somewhere and document. It's more interesting to use media deconstruction from propaganda sources, maybe from Ukrainian sources also because it's a question of ideology.

One of my favorite materials now is people doing vlogs - just with their camera or mobile phone going from Russia to Crimea or back. You only have two ways to go there because airports aren't working, so you go through the Kerch-Crimea bridge. Now because of Mariupol's strategic location, you can go through there, so you have two different roads. People from different Russian cities sometimes film their road and say "what is this, is it destroyed?" This is the average Russian person, and you can hear the propaganda they're repeating or what they're really thinking. For me, it's important to show these different points of view from people who were there or are there now. I don't have the opportunity as a Ukrainian citizen to go there. Through this method, in the near future when I finish this film, we can have testimonies from the inside. We don't need to wait for the war to end because we don't know how or when it ends. It's important to show it to people who maybe don't know anything about what's going on in Mariupol.

Andrew Keen: Given the abundance of video on the internet, on platforms like YouTube, how do you distinguish between propaganda and truth yourself in terms of taking some of these segments to make your film? It could be conceivable that some of the more absurd videos are put out by Ukrainians to promote their own positions and undermine the Russians. Have you found that? Is there a propaganda war on YouTube and other platforms between Ukrainian and Russian nationalists? And as a filmmaker who's trying to archive the struggle in an honest way, how do you deal with that?

Anna Kryvenko: Of course, there are many people, and Mariupol is the best example because the Russian government is paying people to repeat pro-Russian ideology. Sometimes you can see just an average person from Mariupol going with a camera and shooting something without speaking - this is just documentation. Sometimes you have Russian people there for some days just saying something. And of course, you get different segments of real propaganda from some ministry in Russia with drone material and big music. I'm always trying to question myself: What am I looking at? Who is speaking? On technical aspects, why is this like this? It helps me to be holistic.

Of course, I'm from Ukraine, and sometimes this is the most uncomfortable - you can hear actual people from Mariupol saying something you don't want to hear because it's not your point of view on the war. But these are people really from the city giving some kind of realistic point of view on the situation. It's sad, but there were statistics at the end of 2024 that about 150,000 people were returning to occupied territories, not only to Mariupol but all occupied territories. Maybe 40% were coming back to register their property and then returning to Ukrainian territory, but many people are returning to Mariupol because they don't have anywhere to live in Ukraine. It's not hundreds but thousands of people. As Ukrainians, we're not comfortable with this because we're all in different situations. But if something's not comfortable for my point of view, it doesn't mean it's bad or good.

Andrew Keen: It's an important project. I know your artist residency at the Central European University is finishing at the end of February. You're going to focus on finishing the movie. When do you think it will be ready and what are your ambitions for the finished movie? Will you put it online, in theaters? What's your ideal?

Anna Kryvenko: If everything goes well, we can finish it in a year and a half because it will be a long process of editing and working with rights. We only started working on it six months ago, and it's starting to go faster. Documentary making is a long process because of funding and everything. Even though I don't need to go somewhere physically, it's still a long process with a lot of waiting. First, we're thinking about festivals, maybe a theater release, maybe we'll have some broadcasters because it's an important topic to show to a wider audience. After a year, we'll see.

Andrew Keen: If "Buildings Can Talk" is the subtitle of this upcoming movie "This House is Undamaged," it's a really important project about Mariupol. Thank you for being on the show. I'm going to have to get you back when the movie is done because I can't wait to see it.

Anna Kryvenko: Thank you so much. Thank you.

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Anna Kryvenko (1986, Ukraine) is a video and fine art photography artist based in Prague and Kyiv. She is a Fellow at the Artist in Residence program, Institute for Advanced Studies at Central European University. She graduated from the Centre for Audio-Visual Studies at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU, Prague). Her films and performances were screened at Dok Leipzig, ZagrebDox, Visions du Reel Nyon, Fluidum Festival, Jihlava Documentary Film Festival, etc. With her found-footage film Silently Like a Comet, she won the prize for the Best Experimental Act at FAMUFEST, Prague (CZ), and a few others. Her film Listen to the Horizon won the prize for the Best Czech Experimental Documentary, Jihlava IDFF (CZ). Her first feature documentary film My Unknown Soldier won the Last Stop Trieste 2018 Postproduction Award, Special Mention at Zagreb Dox, the Special Prize of the Jury at IDFF CRONOGRAF, and the Andrej Stankovič Prize. Her newest short film Easier Than You Think won the Jury Award of the Other Vision Competition 2022 (PAF, Czech Republic).

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting the daily KEEN ON show, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy interview series. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

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