Original subtitles

[narrator] Devastating wars.

Pitiless rulers...

in pursuit of power over centuries.

When Russia takes up arms, the world holds its breath.

[foreboding theme music playing]

[narrator] The Kremlin: for centuries, the center of Russian power.

In magnificent St. George's Hall,

a reception is held to honor war veterans.

They served under Stalin, and still mourn the loss of his empire.

As does their leader, Vladimir Putin.

Flashback to the year 2000. Putin springs a surprise.

He wants to reintroduce Stalin's national anthem from 1944.

[indistinct chatter in Russian]

[narrator] According to Putin, the USSR's old national anthem

will reconcile the past and present.

Even in 2000, he was thinking

the Soviet Union would probably return somehow.

[choir singing national anthem]

[narrator] This is a real surprise.

The guests don't quite know what to make of it.

The tune is familiar, but the words are new.

Now it's about love for the fatherland,

not, as in Stalin's time, love for the Party.

[man] In the 20th century, Stalin is the most successful Russian ruler.

And Putin admires that.

[narrator] Is it just symbolism?

Or does Putin see himself as Stalin's successor?

Is he planning to resurrect the Soviet empire?

[indistinct shouting in German]

[narrator] November 1989:

the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev,

head of the Soviet government and of the Party,

has permitted a peaceful revolution in East Germany.

More than half a million Soviet soldiers are stationed in the DDR.

They remain in their barracks.

The end of Soviet dominance is now only a matter of time.

Gorbachev tries desperately to keep on top of events.

[crowd cheering]

[narrator] In March 1990, the Soviet star falls in Vilnius.

Lithuania proclaims independence.

The Kremlin responds with tanks.

[man screaming]

[narrator] The Soviet Union uses force for the last time.

14 Lithuanians die, more than 700 are hurt.

[man and woman talk indistinctly]

[man 2] This deployment was a last

desperate attempt to use military power

to maintain, at least in part, the unity of the Soviet Union.

[narrator] The three Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania,

leave the empire first.

Following uprisings in Georgia,

it, too, declares independence and elects a new president.

[muffled explosion]

[narrator] But now, citizens loyal to Moscow take up arms.

Chiefly in two pro-Russian regions.

Hundreds die in clashes with the new presidential guard.

August 1991:

a coup against Gorbachev to prevent the adoption of a new "Union Treaty."

By granting wide-ranging freedoms to individual republics,

Gorbachev still hopes to save the Soviet Union.

But the conservative plotters are too attached to the old Soviet state,

and so speed its ultimate demise.

It was mainly the people who wanted to hold on

to the idea of the Soviet Union.

People from the KGB and the military, too.

That is, the hardliners.

[narrator] Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Soviet Republic,

is the man of the hour.

He opposes the coup.

He appears to be standing up for democracy.

[crowd chanting in support of Yeltsin]

[speaking indistinctly]

[narrator] Mikhail Gorbachev resigns.

Yeltsin attacks him, because Gorbachev refuses to abandon the Soviet Union.

For Yeltsin, it's already history.

He dissolves the Communist Party, and then the Soviet state itself.

The Red Flag is no more.

After the three Baltic states,

eleven other Soviet republics declare their independence.

The Soviet Union shrinks to the Russian Federation.

Russian troops leave the former East Germany.

Weapons and soldiers return to Russia.

The government of newly unified Germany

pays Moscow 12 billion Deutschmarks.

The money doesn't flow to the military.

It's used to save the whole country from bankruptcy.

Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan hand over to Russia

the nuclear weapons stationed on their territory.

In exchange, the Kremlin guarantees their full sovereignty

and the inviolability of their borders.

The military budget in the final years of the Soviet Union

is between 200 and 250 billion dollars.

In the 1990s, annual Russian expenditure

drops to less than 20 billion dollars.

The euphoria for Yeltsin and the new freedoms doesn't last.

The economy hits rock bottom.

Russians associate democracy with crisis and decline.

For centuries, the Caucasus, with its ethnic and religious mix,

has been a focus of political turmoil.

Georgia is now independent.

Moscow is determined that Chechnya, in the northern Caucasus,

will remain inside the Russian Federation.

In December 1994, the Russian army marches in to Chechnya.

They're there to fight the separatists who've declared independence.

But why does Yeltsin unleash this war, and why now?

The powerful Security Service plays a crucial role.

[Felshtinsky] The first Chechen War was organized by the KGB, by the FSB.

These people thought Russia shouldn't develop in a democratic way.

It must become involved in a political provocation, in a war.

[narrator] The war runs out of control.

The troops are unmotivated, their weapons obsolescent.

Yeltsin faces massive criticism.

[woman] I put a lot of blame on Yeltsin's war in '94,

because that was completely unnecessary.

Yeltsin himself said, "You take all the independence you want."

So they said, "Fine, we want to be independent."

As they've been wanting for the whole history of Russia since the czars.

And he said, "Oh, no, no, I don't really mean it for you."

Hundreds of soldiers are taken prisoner.

It's months before they're reunited with their mothers.

Many are less than 20 years old.

Some have only just been redeployed from East Germany.

[Klein] The troops in Chechnya were mainly conscripts and elite units.

The high numbers of dead conscripts

caused Yeltsin very serious political problems at home.

[narrator] Thousands of soldiers are killed on both sides.

[Litvinenko] I interrogated a young boy, 17 years old.

By the way, he was a clever, widely read boy.

I asked him only one question: why did you go to fight?

He said: "I hate this war, and I don't want to fight."

"I fight because all my classmates are fighting."

"I remember some films about World War

II, when the whole class went to fight."

[narrator] Litvinenko was then an army officer in Chechnya.

Later he becomes a career officer in the KGB.

In 1995, many victims of the Chechen War disappear in mass graves.

Separatists talk of a genocide against the civilian population.

The result is Islamist terrorism in Russia.

In the run-up to the 1995 presidential election,

Yeltsin agrees a ceasefire.

Russian troops withdraw, leaving behind scorched earth.

Yeltsin was extremely unpopular.

Democrats stopped supporting him.

Actually, Yeltsin should be investigated

for war crimes committed by the Russian army.

[narrator] To the surprise of many, Yeltsin is re-elected.

But he has lost the Chechen War

and is making no progress with the West.

[military band playing grand salute]

[indistinct conversation]

[narrator] Back in July 1990,

German Chancellor Helmut Kohl visits the Caucasus.

He's here to seize an opportunity offered by the fall of the Wall:

German reunification.

Mikhail Gorbachev makes a concession:

a united Germany can stay in NATO.

The Soviets, however, receive a verbal assurance

that NATO won't expand any further eastwards.

The existence of this promise remains in dispute to this day.

It isn't mentioned in the Two Plus Four Treaty

on German reunification.

Of course they didn't put it in,

because they thought that handshake,

you know, how they do it in the old world,

is just going to be good enough.

There is no document recording this.

It was "free-thinking" in the euphoria of reunification

at the end of the Cold War.

[woman 2] George Bush was clear.

"They didn't win the Cold War, we did."

Good morning, everybody.

[narrator] At the 1997 NATO summit in Madrid,

Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia,

former members of the Warsaw Pact, are invited to join the Alliance,

seriously upsetting Moscow.

The then US Secretary of Defense

was opposed to the eastward extension of NATO.

Much too risky. Danger of escalation.

We shouldn't rub Russia's nose in it too hard

in the time of its post-imperial decline.

[narrator] NATO sweeps all reservations aside.

With the accession of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary,

Alliance territory has shifted to the east.

[military trumpets playing]

[narrator] Did Bill Clinton trick Yeltsin?

[Neitzel] Nobody tricked anyone.

Russia was weak.

Russia didn't veto it, didn't say, "Absolutely no way!"

Maybe they could have delayed it.

Maybe they could have come up with a stronger counteroffer.

The Russians didn't do that in '97.

[narrator] The conflict over NATO's eastward expansion

will affect Russia's relations with the West for years to come.

February 1999, the Kremlin.

President Yeltsin at an awards ceremony for officers.

The only man in civilian clothes is Vladimir Putin.

He has risen fast.

Once a KGB lieutenant-colonel in East Germany,

he was deputy mayor in St. Petersburg,

before moving to the center of power in Moscow.

Now, Putin is head of the FSB, successor to the KGB.

His Petersburg team has come with him to the Security Service.

[suspenseful music playing]

I understood who was in control of the Federal Security Service.

It was Putin and his friends. They were running the country.

I realized we couldn't keep silent.

So my friends and I held a press conference.

[narrator] Litvinenko and others publicly accuse their employers,

the FSB, and thus Putin,

of ordering political murders.

He says he himself received such an order,

which he refused to carry out.

Fearing the FSB's wrath, Litvinenko and his family flee to London.

The interviews he recorded there in 2001 and 2002

give a unique insight into Putin's career,

from someone who knew and worked with him.

In November 2006, FSB agents lure

Litvinenko to London's Millennium Hotel,

where they poison him with radioactive polonium.

Weeks later, he dies a painful death.

[discordant electronic music playing]

[narrator] Shortly before Litvinenko's death,

the journalist Anna Politkovskaya is murdered in Moscow.

She has repeatedly sharply criticized Putin.

Political murder has always been the stock-in-trade of the KGB.

Now it sees a renaissance with Putin's FSB.

Under Putin, the FSB takes over some of the army's role.

In particular, border security.

In the Yeltsin years, the army shrinks from five million to 1.7 million.

The FSB's ranks swell from 100,000 to 288,000.

The Russian army is only partly operational.

There's too little money to develop new weapons.

And Yeltsin hasn't learned any lessons

from the military disaster in Chechnya.

In August 1999,

he appoints Vladimir Putin his new prime minister.

Putin is hardly known outside Moscow and St. Petersburg.

It's not clear how he can win the upcoming parliamentary election.

It seems the FSB has a plan to boost his popularity.

Immediately following his appointment,

and presumably with Yeltsin's approval,

Putin starts a new war in Chechnya.

Russia beaks the 1996 ceasefire.

Putin flies to Chechnya in a fighter jet.

That goes down well.

The previously anonymous politician

is leading the nation's fight against terrorism.

A few weeks later, a Moscow housing estate is shaken by terrorist blasts.

More than 300 people are killed.

Putin immediately blames Chechen terrorists.

It's the escalation he needs.

[Felshtinsky] This was the first major terrorist attack in Russia.

And everybody was frightened.

Everybody was expecting more and more buildings to be blown up.

And on 23 September,

a local militia found an explosive device

in an apartment building in Ryazan.

[narrator] The night before, local residents had seen strangers

dragging sacks into the building.

The police make three arrests.

The men are apparently FSB agents.

In the cellar of the building, the police

find sacks with explosives and a timer.

But then two days later, Moscow comes up with a different explanation.

It was a security test, and the sacks contained nothing but sugar.

[narrator] Was the FSB really ready to blow up Russian citizens

to polish Putin's image as an anti-terrorist?

Ryazan was not a training exercise,

but an attempt to commit an act of terrorism.

They were caught red-handed.

The FSB is a terrorist organization.

My assumption is that it was the FSB.

I wouldn't put it past them.

Above all, I wouldn't put it past Putin to sacrifice his own people

to have the justification for a war

and stabilize his own position inside the country.

I wouldn't put it past him at all.

[narrator] Putin immediately orders bombing raids

on the Chechen capital, Grozny.

He says he'll hunt down the terrorists,

if necessary, "Even in the shithouse."

He gets the headlines he wants.

Russian troops proceed with the utmost brutality,

even against civilians.

[dramatic music playing]

This way of waging war

against the civilian population has a long tradition.

It has a lot to do with the way the army has been trained

to maintain the government's authority inside the country, by force.

This violent, brutal policy was applied in Putin's Chechen War

in the way the city of Grozny was virtually razed to the ground.

We see that the brutality of this form of war

is in part the result of a failure of leadership.

But it is also a consciously accepted form of lawlessness,

a lack of accountability,

because any crime committed will not be punishable in Russia itself.

And finally, this brutality is adopted as

a conscious form of psychological warfare

to undermine the resistance of the civilian population

and of the enemy's military.

[narrator] Putin regularly visits the troops in Chechnya.

He praises the fighters and distributes gifts.

At home, his popularity soars.

The FSB's plan is succeeding.

The people wanted a leader like that.

They got it.

They supported him.

They killed people in Chechnya, and everybody kept silent.

[narrator] At the end of 1999,

Yeltsin resigns and makes Putin acting president.

With that, he takes over the nuclear codes.

But Putin hasn't yet achieved his goal.

He has to win the presidential election of March 2000.

[suspenseful music playing]

The KGB were making a decision that clearly they needed a figurehead.

They needed somebody who was going to take over the reins,

but be manipulated by them.

And this person that they chose was Vladimir Putin.

Vladimir Putin was a mere lieutenant-colonel. He was a nobody.

This was very clearly a carefully planned change, a transition of power,

so that the KGB/FSB could regain its prominence

and its dominance in Russia after Yeltsin was gone.

They became successful, unfortunately for all of us.

And now we are dealing with the problem created by that success.

[narrator] A reception for the heads of the armed forces at the Kremlin:

one of Putin's first official engagements.

He promises to strengthen the army,

to give them more respect

and more money.

[Neitzel] Russia's political capital

rests on the strength of its armed forces.

That was important in the czar's empire, in the Soviet Union,

in the Cold War, and it's still important now.

Why is Russia still important?

Certainly not because of its moribund economy.

For its natural resources, sure,

but also because of its military, its nuclear weapons.

[narrator] Election night, March 2000.

Putin has won the presidential election in the first round.

[speaking in Russian]

[narrator] Where is he taking the country?

The swearing-in ceremony,

extravagant as anything from the time of the Romanovs.

A new czar is born.

Among the guests, somewhat lost: Mikhail Gorbachev.

[Sebag Montefiore] Putin channels a lot of ideas and ambitions

from the Romanov dynasty.

In many ways, he's very similar to Nicholas I,

who outwitted the West for 20 or 30 years

and really embraced internally the ideas

of Orthodoxy, nationality and empire.

So he takes what he needs

from both the Romanov empire and the Stalinist empire.

This connection to the tradition of the Russian empire before 1917

is another twist again,

on his view that the collapse of the Soviet Union

was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th Century.

[crowd murmuring]

[narrator] The young president arouses plenty of enthusiasm.

It feels like the beginning of a new age.

At the same time in Chechnya,

they're still filling mass graves with the victims of Russian aggression.

More than 150,000 civilians and 25,000 soldiers

were killed in the Chechen Wars.

Putin guarantees the autonomy of Chechnya

and installs an indigenous president, Akhmad Kadyrov, in Grozny.

After his murder in 2004, his son Ramzan takes his place.

Ramzan still controls most of Chechnya as Moscow's brutal proxy.

[speaking in Chechen]

[narrator] An international memorial ceremony at sea.

On August 12, 2000,

a few months after the presidential election,

Russia's nuclear submarine Kursk sinks

when one of its own torpedoes explodes.

The Kursk was the pride of the Russian navy.

All 118 crew die.

[Neitzel] The Kursk goes down in 100 meters of water.

If they had raised her upright, she would

have reared 60 meters out of the water.

She's 160 meters long!

And the Russians don't have the capability

to free their own sailors trapped inside.

It's really disastrous for the public image of Russia's armed forces.

[narrators] Wives and mothers of the crew

wait and hope for rescue.

But Putin refuses help from abroad.

He only meets bereaved relatives eleven days after the accident.

[Kusber] Empathy for those who perished,

and their families, isn't his strength.

Silence about the dead is a tradition that reaches far back,

at least into Soviet times.

[narrator] Murmansk, base of the Russian northern fleet.

Nearby, a graveyard for dozens of nuclear submarines.

Radioactive scrap.

At the turn of the new century,

Russia's navy is in catastrophic shape.

[Klein] It's a metaphor for the state of the armed forces

after almost two decades of failure to modernize.

Those reforms that did take place were really cuts,

in soldiers' wages, if they were paid at all,

and out of date, inadequately maintained equipment.

[narrator] In the first decade of the Putin era

military expenditure continuously rises:

from about ten billion dollars in the year 2000

to more than 50 billion in 2009.

New weapons like short-range Iskander missiles

are to bring Russian forces up to the level of the West.

But a significant part of the military budget

is absorbed by endemic corruption.

June 2001.

The first meeting between the new man in the Kremlin and a US president.

George W. Bush is delighted.

I looked the man in the eye.

I found him very straightforward and trustworthy.

I was able to get a sense of his soul.

[Khrushcheva] George Bush looked in his

eyes and saw his soul, which is bizarre,

because Putin's eyes are the most impenetrable you can ever imagine.

[Felshtinsky] He was young. He was unknown.

And this played a positive role for him,

being accepted by the Western community, the Western leaders.

[narrator] In September 2001,

Putin addresses the Bundestag in Berlin. In German.

His presentation of a new Russia, open to the world,

receives a standing ovation.

A new beginning.

Or a coldly calculated piece of make-believe.

[Richie] The real Putin is an FSB thug.

He always was, and he always will be.

Once you're in a security service apparatus of that kind of government,

and you do the sorts of things that he was even doing in East Germany,

which is about infiltration and

manipulation and propaganda and spying.

And these people learn from the very beginning

to disguise their real feelings and their real intentions.

[band plays military march]

[narrator] On the memorial day for victory over Nazi Germany in 2002,

Putin dispenses with a big display of weaponry.

It's more of a festival for army veterans.

In any case, the Red Army doesn't have much new to show.

The atmosphere is almost peaceful.

Just two years later, Putin reveals Russia's latest weapons

at a Moscow air show.

The US Air Force gets an invite,

to see first-hand the renewed strength and confidence of Russia's military.

Putin is massively re-arming.

That goes for Russia's nuclear arsenal too.

Ukraine's president, Putin's ally, Leonid Kuchma,

is reaching the end of his term.

Two men are competing to be his successor:

Moscow loyalist Viktor Yanukovych

and opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko.

Yushchenko has distanced himself from Moscow.

He wants to lead Ukraine towards the West.

He wants his country to join NATO.

Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia

all recently joined NATO.

From Russia's perspective, Ukrainian membership must be thwarted

at all costs.

That includes assassination.

Unknown persons try to poison

pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko.

Doctors in a specialist Vienna clinic save his life.

Badly scarred, he returns to the campaign in Kyiv.

[Felshtinsky] By now it is known that it was Russian operatives

who were behind this attempt,

and that they escaped back to Russia.

And Russia, of course, refused to extradite them.

[narrator] Yushchenko gains a strong sympathy vote.

He wins the election against Yanukovych

and against Moscow.

[speaking in Ukrainian]

[crowd cheers]

[military command]

[narrator] January 2005:

the new Ukrainian president is sworn in.

But his much-vaunted "orange revolution" gets bogged down.

Ukraine is still corrupt,

and polarized.

[suspenseful music playing]

[narrator] In February 2007,

Putin travels to the European Security Conference in Munich.

The tone of his speech is extremely blunt.

The West is ignoring Russia's interests.

Is this the New World Order?

[narrator] He complains once more about the broken promise

not to expand NATO eastwards.

[Felshtinsky] He took his mask off

and started to be angry and ugly.

But this goes again with the KGB training.

They're nice if it's needed to be nice.

They are terrible if it's needed to be terrible.

And they are dangerous and ready to kill if it's demanded from them.

[narrator] Putin is most concerned about the alleged dangers

to Russia's security.

But in fact, it's all about the survival of his regime.

This secret group photo from 2008

shows the top officials of the FSB, Russia's de facto rulers.

Security in Russia is not defined as national security,

but the security of the regime.

Everything is seen through the lens of the security of the regime,

of Putin and the people around him.

[narrator] Abkhazia and South Ossetia,

two pro-Russian provinces of Georgia,

are fighting for their independence.

In August 2008, a Russian army invades Georgia

to help South Ossetia fight Georgian troops.

It's also a demonstration of power aimed at NATO,

which has long been eyeing Georgia and Ukraine

as future members of the Alliance.

They said both countries will be NATO members one day, but not when.

It was clear to Russia's leaders: this must be hindered,

doesn't fit the image of Russia as a great power,

with spheres of influence that it controls.

[narrator] Once the war is over, the Kremlin recognizes Abkhazia

and South Ossetia as independent states.

The same policy they'll later use in Ukraine.

Russia's attack on Georgia is mainly conducted

through Abkhazian and Ossetian territory.

This was the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union

when the Russian forces were used abroad.

Nothing happened.

The West did not react to this invasion.

And for Putin this was an invitation to proceed further.

[narrator] The limited international reaction to the invasion of Georgia

encourages Putin to consider further expansion of his power

by force.

After a few days, Putin's army withdraws from Georgia.

Losses are high.

An estimated 1,500 deaths on either side.

Russians realized that they may have won a quick victory, in five days,

but not because their forces were superior,

but because they so far outnumbered their enemy.

They used that as an excuse to carry out military reforms

that had been shelved for a long time.

[Neitzel] They massively reduce the number of conscripts

and start professionalizing the army.

There are still conscripts, but the army is mainly career soldiers

who can carry out high-tech operations.

A lot of money is invested in the navy,

in the air force and in special ops.

[narrator] After the Georgian war, Russian military expenditure increases

from 51 billion dollars a year

to more than 80 billion dollars in 2013 and 2014,

just before the attack on Ukraine.

From 2008 to 2014,

Russia's armed forces became a central element of foreign policy,

with talk of "heavy metal diplomacy,"

coercive diplomacy using military means.

[narrator] Russia invests in "heavy metal,"

a modern army for the conflicts of the 21st century.

And from 2007, Russia also practices cyber warfare.

When computer networks in Estonia crash,

it's the first known foreign deployment of Russia's cyberforces.

The enemy is the West, and it must be fought at every level.

That's not just an issue for the Russian military,

but for the whole of Russian society.

So there are media offensives, cyber warfare

and other new techniques that didn't

play a role in the Soviet Union's wars,

or those of the czarist empire.

[narrator] Putin also seeks the

support of the Russian Orthodox Church,

led from 2009 by Patriarch Kirill.

He is one of the chief influencers

for a revived "greater Russian Empire."

[Kusber] Patriarch Kirill talks of the so-called "Russian World."

Which makes him more or less the chief ideologue of Putin's regime.

The concept goes well beyond Russia's current political borders.

Ukraine is part of it.

So is Belarus,

and so are the regions with a high proportion of Russian speakers.

In the Baltic states, around Kaliningrad and other places.

[narrator] From 2013, Putin starts to claim these countries

as part of Russia's sphere of influence.

It's not about this or that region.

I believe it's about Putin putting down markers.

"I'm against the West. I have a different system."

"And I don't want to be bound up in your world."

"I'm creating another world."

[narrator] Even if its economy and the

size of its population don't justify it,

Putin's Russia wants to be a superpower

on equal footing with the USA.

[crowd singing national songs]

[narrator] End of November 2013.

Demonstrations on the Maidan, Kyiv's central square.

Ukraine's political self-image has shifted.

Away from Moscow, towards the EU and NATO.

But Viktor Yushchenko has been replaced as Ukrainian president

by Viktor Yanukovych.

The puppet of the Kremlin rejects his predecessor's Cooperation Agreement

with the EU.

[Gloger] Yanukovich is pro-Moscow and against the EU Association Agreement.

The people of Kyiv and the Ukraine want to free themselves from Moscow.

They know their country is imperfect and corrupt.

But they want to go their own way.

[narrator] As the weeks pass, the protests on the Maidan grow.

Young people occupy the square day and night,

as if anticipating a decisive battle for the future of their country.

[dramatic music playing]

The Russian leadership see this as a plot,

a conspiracy by Western states to

surround Russia with pro-Western regimes

whose final aim is to force regime change in Russia.

[narrator] Nothing less than the whole of Russia is at stake.

Putin is in no doubt about that.

[Neitzel] "We don't believe Ukraine belongs to the West."

"Ukraine is Russian. A clear red line is being overstepped."

"If you don't understand that, there will be war."

[narrator] The "war" begins on February 18, 2014.

Snipers from Ukraine's special forces start to pick off demonstrators.

But some of the insurgents are armed too,

and they fire back.

[gunfire]

[Felshtinsky] Putin was offering to Yanukovych to use force.

And that's why, with some Russian help,

some snipers started to shoot at the crowd.

[Kusber] It's very likely that at that moment,

Russian security service specialists were working as agents provocateurs

to stir up violence.

But it's also true that weapons were used on the Ukrainian side.

[narrator] More than 80 people die in the massacre on the Maidan.

Yanukovych calls fresh elections to defuse the conflict.

Days later, he decamps to Russia and is relieved of office.

Immediately after the shooting on the Maidan,

the Russian army occupies Ukraine's Crimea.

Putin uses the power-vacuum left by Ukraine's political U-turns

to seize Crimea.

Crimea is geostrategically significant.

And it's important for propaganda and ideological reasons too.

Crimea is the "Pearl of the Empire." And he gets it back.

[narrator] Crimea has been Russian territory

since Catherine the Great's victory over the Ottomans.

But in 1954, after Stalin's death,

then Soviet General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev

gifted Crimea to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine.

Russian soldiers with no insignia on their uniforms,

so-called "Green Men,"

meet almost no resistance in Crimea.

[Felshtinsky] There was no fighting for Crimea,

because even Ukrainians knew that Crimea is a Russian territory.

I mean, it was just considered to be Ukrainian territory by mistake.

That doesn't alter the fact that in international law

it was an illegal annexation.

Crimea is the territory of the sovereign state of Ukraine.

[narrator] In Ukraine's Donbas region,

pro-Russian separatists soon start shooting

at Ukrainian soldiers and militiamen.

Russia provokes skirmishes

to extend the territory held by pro-Moscow fighters.

[speaking in Russian]

[narrator] Russia occupies Crimea in February 2014,

at the same time launching a proxy war against Ukraine

in the regions of Luhansk and Donetsk in the Donbas.

[Felshtinsky] Prior to 2014,

Ukrainians did not have an army at all.

The fighting, which took place later

in spring and summer of 2014 in Donbas,

was conducted mainly by volunteers

who actually, you know, didn't know how to fight.

[narrator] Once again, international reaction to the occupation of Crimea

and the war in Donbas is muted.

The West again allows Putin to believe he can pursue

expansionist policies without risk.

Looking back, it should have been a much more robust response

to make it clear this annexation would carry a far higher price.

I would argue, if those sanctions

would be on the level which we see now,

the invasion of February '22 would never happened.

[narrator] The only notable Western reaction

came in President Barack Obama's speech at a conference in The Hague.

Russia is a regional power

that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors.

Not out of strength, but out of weakness.

[narrator] Putin's reply is a huge

parade bristling with military hardware.

At the night-time rehearsal, all the weaponry the army has to offer

crosses Red Square.

Including ballistic missiles.

Aleppo.

In September 2015,

the Russian Air Force intervenes in Syria's civil war.

It's a great-power gesture with devastating consequences,

especially for the civilian population.

Officially, the campaign is part of the international struggle

against Islamic fundamentalists.

In reality, Putin is also propping up the Assad regime

against armed opposition supported by the US.

[speaking in Russian]

The Russians used Syria, first to bomb their way back

onto the international stage,

and then to gain significance on the international stage.

And, of course, they also used it to test their weapons

and to gain experience.

[male voice speaking in Russian]

[narrator] Putin and his generals follow the campaign

on a giant screen.

He allows Western cameras in to watch.

The whole world must see how powerful Putin's Russia has become.

[general speaking in Russian]

[Neitzel] It's very clear this is no longer just about Syria.

It's about a confrontation with a heavily armed NATO.

The basic idea is to demonstrate Russia's

ability to fight a 21st century war.

On the one hand a hybrid war, but also a great war against the West.

[narrator] In Syria, the Russians

deliberately target the civilian population.

This is a war crime.

Exactly as in Chechnya, 20 years before.

[shouting]

[Richie] If you look at Chechnya, if you look at Georgia,

if you look at Syria and also Ukraine in 2014,

the way in which these military attacks and conflicts

were carried out with utmost brutality should have been a sign to all of us

that this is not a man who you're going

to sit around a negotiating table with.

If he's capable of this sort of thing,

he does not stand for the sorts of

values that that we claim to stand for.

[narrator] The provocations increase.

NATO AWACS monitor more airspace infringements by Russian fighters.

Russia stations new missiles at Kaliningrad,

directly on NATO's borders.

Russia's hypersonic Avangard missile

is a weapon for which there is supposedly no defense.

A great confrontation seems inevitable.

Putin seeks divine support.

In June 2020, he consecrates a new cathedral

dedicated to Russia's military.

[Kusber] Near Moscow, there is a cathedral for the Russian army

with an illustrated historical record

linking past wars, including before 1917,

with the tasks awaiting the military of the future.

There are empty spaces for commemorations of future battles.

[religious chanting]

[narrator] The church glamorizes war and glorifies crimes,

like the bloody purges under Stalin

that claimed the lives of millions of Russians.

Putin, his defense minister and Patriarch Kirill

attend the consecration.

Construction cost more than 75 million euros.

[male voice singing religious chants]

[somber music playing]

[narrator] A mural commemorating the "repatriation" of the Crimea,

paying homage to Putin and his coterie,

is still incomplete at the time of the consecration.

[Richie] He wants to go down in history

as a figure like Peter the Great or like Stalin.

For him, his own ego and his own individual importance

in his mythical idea of the world history

is more important than the reality.

I very much fear a Hitler in the bunker parallel,

that he's just not going to be able to see reality.

[speaking in Russian]

[band plays military march]

[narrator] Russia wants its empire back.

That's been the goal of ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin

for more than 20 years.

[siren sounds in the distance]

[narrator] Kyiv, February 24th, 2022.

Air raid sirens.

Russia is attacking Ukraine in a full-scale invasion.

People try to find places of safety.

There's chaos on the roads and streets.

Putin calls it a special military operation

for the liberation of Ukraine.

And he threatens the West.

[speaking in Russian]

[Felshtinsky] This war is not about Ukraine.

It's his major battle to control the world.

[narrator] It is Putin's third war.

With severe Russian losses from day one.

But in Russia's wars, casualties have never counted.