Guy Ritchie's much-discussed film about an American military operation in Afghanistan, released in Russian cinemas as "The Translator", is in the original still called The Covenant, which means "agreement, compact, testament"

Guy Ritchie's much-discussed film about an American military operation in Afghanistan, released in Russian cinemas as "The Translator", is in the original still called The Covenant, which means "agreement, compact, testament". So the point of the film is not, after all, the mere fact that there were interpreters drawn from the local population who agreed to work with the American forces. The point is the loudly proclaimed agreement, the offer that the American authorities made to the Afghan people: refuge and a visa in exchange for help. The action of the picture turns precisely on Operation Allies Refuge. Shortly before handing Afghanistan over to be torn apart by a **banned organisation, the Americans promised to evacuate from the country every Afghan who had worked with them. That meant hundreds of thousands of people, and their families besides. Guy Ritchie recalled this headlong flight of the summer of 2021 and, somewhere at the very end of the film, almost inaudibly, said that hundreds of interpreters who had counted on the protection of the United States had already been killed, and that the fates of thousands more remain unknown to anyone. The reason is very simple: nobody evacuated them, nobody gave them a visa, and to all appearances nobody intends to rescue them. It is good that some were lucky, but, alas, there were not enough Gyllenhaals to go round. So much for the covenant