Moscow's decade-long war in Chechnya is the subject here, tracing how a conflict that began with Russian troops moving to crush a breakaway republic turned into a grinding campaign of shelling, disappearances, and filtration camps. The film draws on war footage from Grozny and the Chechen countryside, showing leveled apartment blocks and columns of refugees, alongside accounts of Russian efforts to control what the outside world could see of the fighting. It follows the war's spread beyond Chechnya's borders, including the hostage crises and bombings that Moscow tied to the conflict, and asks how a small republic held off a much larger army for so long. Interviews and reporting from the ground fill in what official Russian statements left out, and the film treats the censorship itself as part of the story: journalists blocked, casualty figures disputed, and a civilian toll that outside observers estimated ran into the tens of thousands.