“Half of the casualties that I've personally seen on the front have just been from crashes, from people doing their best to zoom out of there at 80, 90 miles an hour. And then you wrap your car around a tree.”
Preston Stewart · Policy · November 2026
Context
Explaining why walking into front-line towns is now safer than driving, he lists the road threats: mines, drones hunting vehicles, and the speed people drive to escape them.
Transcript
…the Kharkiv region. It would free up that flank for the Russian army's advance. And this is a big concern for a lot of the locals in the area. So I really wanted to make sure that for a year, I focused on that axis. And that's why the title of the film is One Year on the Kostiantynivka Frontline.
Did you get into Konstantinivka recently?
Recently, it is impossible to get into Konstantinivka now as a foreign journalist. The last time I was in Konstantinka would be very early this year, late last year, with a lot of aid missions evacuating people. The closest I've been to Konstantinivka as of recently is within the villages and the tiny suburban communities right next to it. Like you're talking about Druzhkivka and the areas around Druzekivka right before Konstantinivka. And when you're walking on that axis, you're going to deal with a ton of drone threats. And the safest way to go in there now is walking. You can go in on vehicle, but when we went in on a vehicle, there was a vehicle behind us that was hit shortly after we passed it. There is a lot of dangerous, dangerous threats on the road. You could run over an anti-vehicle mine. You could be hit by an FPV that's coming to hunt your vehicle. You could just crash when you're traveling at extremely high speeds. Half of the casualties that I've personally seen on the front…
Do you make yourself known as press? Like, do you wear a press badge when you're doing this?
It doesn't matter. It doesn't really matter if you mark yourself as press, but I still feel like I have to uphold certain standards because there is a reputation to uphold of the press. You don't want to give any excuses for the crimes that are going to be committed, and it's a question of going to…
It's such a weird dynamic because when you think about, I mean, press in a war zone. And to be, for everyone listening, and I know who you said, you weren't in Konostanthinivka, you were just around the sides of it. Like to be clear, kind of what he said is we weren't in the area that's borderline…
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