Original subtitles

Volodymyr Zelensky!

CHEERING

He was extraordinarily popular. He impressed immediately. Like, "Wow!"

He played the kind of character

that Ukraine was dreaming about.

Ukraine is the place where the destiny

of this century will be hammered out.

EXPLOSION

We're going to be surrounded

within 40 minutes or so.

This is a threat to democracy

for the world.

Imagine...

Imagine being in that situation.

I think it's the President

who can really tell this story.

CROWD: Zelensky! Zelensky!

Zelensky! Zelensky!

Zelensky! Zelensky! Zelensky!

Zelensky!

Zelensky! Zelensky!

Zelensky!

I remember him, when he won the elections,

and he called me and he said, "Listen,

"it's only for one term,

"we will fix it up, it's going to be much better,

"and I will go back, and then I'm going to be just 46 years old

"and I will produce my movies and I will win my Oscar."

CHEERING

I was a scriptwriter of Servant of the People, and now,

when Volodymyr became President,

I continue my work with him as speech writer.

FANFARE

To become a President,

but to stay a man.

Human.

APPLAUSE

You played a President

and then you became President. What was the difference?

Different things. Pfff!

Different things. Even... Even I can't compare.

So it's...

This is very difficult work.

There were very serious challenges

that he was going to face from day one of taking the presidency.

Zelensky has a phone conversation with Donald Trump,

the President of the United States...

..in which, Trump essentially seemed to say,

"We'll continue giving you military aid if you do us a favour."

He wanted an investigation that would dig up dirt

on Trump's political rivals.

Namely, Joe Biden and Joe Biden's son, Hunter.

As Zelensky and his team landed in New York

for the UN General Assembly, all of this was coming out.

Zelensky finds himself embroiled in

this enormous shit-show.

News of this phone call

leads to impeachment proceedings

being launched against Trump...

I think it's ridiculous. It's a witch-hunt.

..and Zelensky is straight away in an impossible position.

But the truth is, Trump did ask him to find dirt on the Bidens.

I will say this, I know a lot of people

from Ukraine. They're great people.

And I owned something called the Miss Universe Pageants years ago

and I sold it to IMG, and when I ran for President,

I thought maybe it wouldn't be the greatest thing to own

the Miss Universe and Miss USA Pageants. But it's a great thing

and we had a winner from Ukraine, and we've really had...

We got to know the country very well, in a lot of different ways.

But it's a country, I think, with tremendous potential. Yes.

I know it, because I am from that country. Right.

LAUGHTER

Thank you very much.

It's a great honour.

Thank you very much, Mr President.

I'm sorry, but I don't want to be involved

to democratic, open elections of USA.

No, you heard that we had, er,

I think, good phone call.

It was normal. We spoke about many things.

And so, I think, and you read it,

that nobody pushed...pushed me, yes. In other words, no pressure.

Some people tell that Servant of the People is a fairy tale.

It's not.

The story is about one man

who tried to broke the system and...can't.

In the TV show, Zelensky and his fellow comedy writers

are in control of the reality - they write the script.

In the real world, Zelensky is not

in control of who he deals with

and what words come out of their mouth.

Reality is out of his control.

As well as problems with Trump,

he also has problems with Putin.

Putin has effectively occupied

a chunk of eastern Ukraine

and annexed Crimea.

In 2014, Putin used special forces,

without any insignia,

to go in and take over Crimea.

He got away with it, nobody did anything,

and so, he started the ongoing

conflict in Ukraine's east.

REPORTER: For the last five-and-a-half years,

Moscow has been arming, funding and many would say

directly controlling fighters in two

rebel-held parts of eastern Ukraine.

Putin was still denying that they're there,

and saying, "Oh, these are separatists", and, "These are..."

You know, "Russia's just a facilitator.

"We're trying to reach a peace agreement here." Total nonsense.

When Zelensky took power, his number-one promise

to the people of Ukraine was to bring peace in the Donbas,

to find a resolution, and he knew that he could not do that

without communicating with Putin.

Many Ukrainians think that Zelensky is being a little bit naive

and that Putin can't be negotiated with.

In your previous work, you say

you were popular, you were a star.

Mostly, people loved you.

You become President. By necessity, all politicians, much criticism.

How did you cope? How did you deal with that?

It's a difficult moment because mostly,

people loved me, that's true.

And then, this is a new pool.

HE LAUGHS

I wasn't... I think at the very beginning, I wasn't ready

to swim in such pool, yes.

It's another part of life.

But... But, er...

But maybe...

Maybe I have to do something.

Maybe they will love me again.

So Zelensky heads to Paris,

where he has his first and only

meeting with Vladimir Putin.

Zelensky set out very early in his administration to talk to Putin

face-to-face, look him in the eye, and say, "What do you want from us?

"How can we end this war

"that keeps sending our soldiers home in caskets?"

The French and the Germans played the role of mediators.

Zelensky was always saying, "Look, while building my career,

"I could negotiate and I could achieve results,"

and he hoped that Putin will be convinced.

CAMERA SHUTTERS CLICK

There is this nervous atmosphere

in the room, and then, we need to leave.

And we were watching it on a screen

and they were sitting in the neighbouring room.

Zelensky's approach was like,

"War is terrible, war is killing.

"We are sitting here, let's just finish it.

"We have the power to finish it."

That was the major message of Zelensky.

Putin tried to close the doors all the time.

Like, "We're not there." Like, "There is no Russian troops there."

Putin flat out lied

in the press conference,

saying, "This is an internal Ukrainian matter.

"Ukrainians need to settle this."

I think this was a big eye-opener for Zelensky.

He thought, I think, that everyone understood what Putin

and Russian forces were doing in Ukraine,

everyone's trying to resolve this, and instead, I think he realised

that, actually, this is an effort of three sides

putting pressure on Ukraine to give things away.

It's a different game here.

Neither Macron or Merkel said a word to contradict Putin.

There were a lot of things unresolved,

but if we have these first steps already there,

then perhaps you can continue, right?

And Zelensky really believed that there will be other meeting.

But Putin never wanted to meet Zelensky again.

INTERVIEWER: Vladimir Putin,

what do you think about his psychology?

What's in... What's going through his head?

I had meeting with him, long meeting,

in December 2019, in France...

..and, er, it's not about...

He's not... He's not a person...

I mean, that humanity.

He has... It's not about this. It's like...

..people who just do the job.

You know? Without any emotions.

Without any, you know... It's like killers. Yes?

It's just a job.

What is the problem?

That he lied...

..very much.

For me, it's a part of my life, this job, and I really...

I love Ukraine and I want, you know, peace,

and we want to remember this period of time

and want people to respect me.

That's it.

For these... And that's it. But this is a part of my life.

Putin, for him,

all this war is his life.

REPORTER: China says the number of people infected

by a mysterious virus has more than tripled.

Scientists say the virus is being spread by human-to-human contact,

and that is especially worrisome...

Putin's story is a kind of dark fairy tale.

I mean, this is a man turning 70,

sees very few people,

doesn't use the internet,

he doesn't have a mobile phone.

He relies on briefings from his close friends.

We're talking about six, eight, ten people.

And this isolation increased during the pandemic.

He was holed up in his presidential palace...

..and he brooded.

I've seen him scuba-dive

to the bottom of the Mediterranean.

I've sat in a room with him. I've tried, unsuccessfully,

to ask some questions at press conferences. I never got picked.

But what I can say is the most dangerous incarnation of Putin

that we've ever seen is amateur historian Putin.

During lockdown,

defence intelligence said he'd written an essay, and so we read it.

It was like reading Mein Kampf.

It basically tells us that the world is united

around the ancient people of Rus...

..and these people need to be

reunited. The Baltic states

don't really exist. Even parts of Finland aren't really true.

What he really showed was his desire to...build a greater Russia.

In the essay, Putin argued that Ukraine was never

a nation or a state or a people.

Actually, that's rubbish.

Despite periods of being part of the Russian Empire,

Ukraine always had a kind of strong democratic tradition.

It was actually a sort of flourishing early civilisation,

going back to the 9th century.

Ask any Ukrainian, and they'll tell you Kyiv is older than Moscow.

And back then, 1,000 years ago,

Moscow was forest and bog.

The title of Vladimir Putin's essay

was On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.

It sounds like the kind of thing you would glance at and toss aside

but, actually, it's a manifesto for war.

REPORTER: These could be the biggest

exercises on Europe's border since

the Cold War, to make sure that

Russia's armed forces are ready for

whatever threats, or opportunities,

present themselves next.

A massive show of force

right on the border with Europe.

A simulated counterattack

of a scenario which they rehearse every four years.

When they left vast amounts of weaponry close to the border...

..it effectively, to me, confirmed this was not normal.

We learnt, from satellites,

intelligence and evidence of

mobile crematorium, which is a horrendous concept in itself.

Crematorium to hide

evidence of their own deaths.

At the time of the September,

I was busy trying to persuade

within government that we needed

to get on with it, and there was

a resistance, because it might provoke.

A lot of the argument would be, "Ooh, you don't want to escalate."

And I would say, "The game has already started. The game's afoot."

Every year, for 20 years already,

we make a New Year show.

For 17 years before, we made fun of other Presidents

and other politicians, and now him.

Everything was changing in Ukraine.

And I was... I really was scared for him

because I didn't know what's going to happen.

The United States were saying,

"The war is coming",

Germany and France were saying, "This is just sabre-rattling".

Different people come to your office.

One says there will be a war, someone else says no.

Third person says, "I don't care whether there will be a war

"or there will not be a war, but our economy is suffering

"just from the fact that we're talking about it."

And everyone is smart,

everyone is full of knowledge and analysis,

but everyone is there in the room

just to give advice to the President.

And, in the end, all the responsibility was on him.

You were receiving intelligence

about the potential of invasion

with the President and discussing how to present this to the public.

How did you make those decisions?

Can Russia categorically rule out the invasion of Ukraine?

We have no intention to do that,

so it means that we have no intention to do that at all.

And it has been said on different levels, of course.

OK, what, then, are the troops doing

massed along the Ukrainian border with Russia?

Troops are exercising, and it is no secret

that they are preparing to deter any kind of threat.

REPORTER: The Ukrainian government is doing its best

to reassure its people there is no cause for alarm,

and that calming message is largely working on a population

which is sceptical that the risk of war is as high as the West fears.

But there is only one person who knows the fate of this country

and, so far, President Putin

is playing his cards close to his chest.

REPORTER: The White House is calling the situation, meantime, quote,

"Extremely dangerous".

There are two paths.

There's a diplomatic path, there's the other path. It is up to

the Russians to determine which path they're going to take.

We believe that diplomacy continues to be viable.

There still remains a window to resolve this

through dialogue and diplomacy.

The logic of the situation seems to be clear -

that Putin has assembled such a colossal force...

..we think that the orders are already starting to be issued

for people to take their forward positions.

We read his crazy essay. We, we, we...

He's obviously...

Very, very difficult for him now to walk this thing back.

Nice to see you. How are you? Thank you very, very much.

Volodymyr Zelensky, he was in a very, very peculiar position.

If he had sounded the alarm bell, you know,

and sent out the whole of Ukraine into panic stations,

that, paradoxically, would have helped achieve Putin's ends.

You could tell that he was under terrific pressure,

but it's not clear to either of us

what is actually going to happen.

It was one of those situations where I was trying to pump...

I was sort of saying, "Come on, come on..." You know,

"What do you really think is going to happen? What do you think

"is really in Putin's mind?" And he was saying to me,

"Well, what do you think is going to happen? Do you think

"Putin's bluffing?" And I said I...we didn't know.

Mr President, do you believe that the Prime Minister

and his American allies are exaggerating the threat from Russia?

During the press conference with Boris Johnson,

I thought that Zelensky was perhaps

not quite on top of events. That this great storm was coming

and he was still, perhaps, looking the other way.

I mean, one former diplomat I spoke to said that

he's always two or three steps behind events.

We are free.

At the time, Zelensky's opinion poll ratings

were slipping. They were going downwards.

At this work, you have to be honest.

But, er... But, er...

..sometimes, you don't want,

and sometimes, it's really very difficult.

Just... Just difficult.

There are some moments when you...

..when you understand that if you'll be honest,

it will make so many, so many problems for people, or for you.

I mean, we are part of society, so...

It's...to be brave.

We flew on a RAF jet into Moscow.

We were rushed in to the Ministry...

..with the Minister of Defence, Shoigu.

General. Thank you.

Gerasimov, Chief of Defence Staff.

And they put on a display of the Arctic convoys

and what we had done together.

HE SPEAKS RUSSIAN

The monument of all the countries

which helped Russ...the USSR.

We had a good meeting. It was, you know, recorded and in public.

None of us wish to be

in an atmosphere of

insecurity, anxiousness.

I have buried too many soldiers in my time.

And then we had an after-meeting, where the Chief of Defence Staff

went with Gerasimov and I went with Shoigu.

A fireside chat, I think it was called, or a one-to-one.

I remember him saying, "We will not invade Ukraine."

I think when a Defence Minister of such an armed force

sits opposite you and says it with a straight face,

you knew you were being lied to.

I remember saying on the way out to someone,

"Somewhere above me, in a room above where we've just sat,

"somebody has got a map on the wall."

I believe you had a phone call with Putin.

It was one of those creepy phone calls of a slightly sort of, erm...

..er...

..with a sort of semi-satirical flavour - at least, from his side.

He made this sort of slightly creepy remark about, erm,

nuclear weapons and, you know, "I don't want to use a nuclear weapon

"against you, Boris", or something like that.

He was saying he was ruling out an invasion.

"There'll be no..." You know, "Not going to happen".

I kept saying to him that he would be nuts to invade.

We kept coming back to this question of, what was the ultimate future

of Ukraine? And I remember him saying to me,

"Well...", you know, "..when is Ukraine going to join Nato?"

And I said, "Well, look, not any time soon."

And he said, "Not any time soon? What does that mean?

"Is that not next month? Not next year? When does that mean?"

And I said, "Well, it means not till...not for any time soon."

But I couldn't say

Ukraine will never...join Nato.

We had to insist

on the right of the Ukrainians

to choose their future.

Quite a few people thought that Zelensky was not up to it,

actually, that he didn't have the fight or the kind of wisdom.

What sort of struck me, as a kind of writer,

as an observer of people and things, is I would walk round

the centre of Kyiv and there were no sandbags.

There were no preparations. There were no tank traps.

There were no checkpoints. There was no panic.

REPORTER: In this historic city,

where they are being told

by Western leaders to expect war at any moment,

they are busy, and they are calm,

and they are dancing.

Was this a clever strategy by Zelensky to fool the Russians

into thinking the Ukrainians were totally unprepared...

..or was it, actually, that Ukrainians

were, on some military level, unprepared?

There are more and more Russian troops on the border

every single day. The White House is telling

American citizens inside Ukraine to get out now.

Depart immediately.

We want to be crystal clear on this point.

And all day, we have seen a flurry of countries

with the exact same message - "Get out".

Secretary of State Antony Blinken just announcing

that the United States will be closing their embassy

in the capital city of Ukraine.

I was sort of sitting in the front row of a press conference.

Please, let's stick to the scheme,

with one question from each journalist.

Sorry. Erm... Thank you very much.

I asked Zelensky, I said, "Look, the foreign ambassadors are leaving."

The American ambassador had moved west, the British ambassador

had followed. Was that the right decision?

I'll never forget, he said, "We do not have a Titanic situation here."

It's curious, because you think about the Titanic

and you sort of think, is the Titanic Ukraine,

heading towards the great Russian iceberg?

Or is, actually, Russia the Titanic -

this hubristic, arrogant, superior nation -

that, unwittingly, is crashing towards the big disaster?

Russian troops currently have Ukraine surrounded.

We believe that they will target Ukraine's capital, Kyiv,

a city of 2.8 million innocent people.

He had his excuse.

Putin was creating a pretext.

REPORTER: The two regions in question are Donetsk and Luhansk,

and diplomats warn that recognising these as independent states

would give Russia the justification it wants to send in troops.

It was like a kind of loyalty test.

There was Putin, sitting like a kind of reproving headmaster,

surrounded by kind of white and gilt, and there was his government.

He was asking them to endorse his plan.

Sergey Naryshkin, the head of

the Foreign Intelligence Service,

when he's asked to make this kind of oath of allegiance...

..fluffs his lines.

What's clear from this is they are all terrified of him.

Absolutely terrified.

Putin, I think he's not alone.

I think there are some similar guys in the world. But...

But not everybody has such, you know, such, erm...

..such chance for their selves, yeah,

to open all their, you know, negative, or all their evil dreams.

Yes. That is the problem, that the West didn't recognise him before

and didn't stop him.

Zelensky sent me to Washington

to talk eye-to-eye

to the US officials, to get the fullest possible picture

of where we are heading to - the timeline.

And, most importantly, what would be the reaction of the United States,

what would they be doing?

Mr Kuleba, it's an honour to welcome you back to the Pentagon

at this critical, critical moment in history.

I am on a diplomatic mission here, but...

We had a series of briefings at the very highest level.

We were told that there was a good prospect

that there would be an invasion,

and some...some speculation

about when that would happen.

Among the agencies of intelligence,

there was a high level of confidence about this.

A lot of the observers thought

that Kyiv was going to fall,

that President Zelensky was going to fall,

and that Ukraine was going to fail to exist as a country.

Russia was determined.

It outnumbered Ukraine on every level.

I mean, its air force outnumbered Ukraine 13 to one.

Who knows, perhaps they thought I was the last Ukrainian

they might ever receive in the White House.

President Biden, he showed me around,

and there is a room behind Oval Office...

..and I asked him, I said, "Listen, I...

"I must tell you that I feel torn apart...

"..between two choices - whether I have to be a minister or a father

"when it comes to the need to evacuate my children,

"because now, I realise, more than ever,

"that the war is...the attack on Ukraine is going to happen."

And he looked at me, he paused, like, for a second,

looked straight in my eyes,

and he said, "Be a father".

That was it. I sent text to my dad, I told him,

"Pack yourself, pack kids - you're leaving Kyiv tonight."

I was very threatened, of course.

It felt like it's really going to happen.

And I took my kids, my family,

and I went to...western Ukraine.

I was in a rather safe place, and the only thing

that I remember about that, I was very scared for him.

I mean, I knew that he was a name.

They wanted him. They want to kill him.

I was in Kyiv on February the 23rd.

It was normal. Bizarrely normal.

People out and about, people in restaurants.

I walked out into the street and I took a call from a contact of mine,

a Ukrainian contact of mine, very well-placed,

who just said a few words - "The invasion will begin at 4am."

EXPLOSIONS

SIREN WAILS

Sounds.

EXPLOSION

Sounds of missiles, of bombing.

SIREN WAILS

EXPLOSION

The phone rings. I've got the ring

from intelligence to Army,

and they said that we...attacked by Russian.

We attacked from the north.

It was first missiles from Belarus.

EXPLOSION

Said to my wife she has to be ready

and, "You will come to me, to my office,

"and please tell children that Russia attacked us."

It was very quickly. Very quickly.

And I was here, and I was the first here in my office.

I'd woken on the morning of the 24th very early,

talked to Volodymyr.

It's just a sort of surreal conversation,

and he describes the invasion.

Where it's happening.

Er, the scale of it, which seemed to be huge.

EXPLOSION

You know, like, I was sleeping.

5am, I think, I got a call,

"It's started. Come over."

I go to the office.

And then, I was driving. The red signals...

Through the street, it's about... Normally, it's 40 minutes' drive,

but I drove there in 18 minutes, I believe.

EXPLOSION

On my path, I saw explosions.

When I came to the office, there were six people.

We did not have this, you know, situation where we are in this room

where you see everything in real time with cameras.

It was all, you know, pieces of information coming to us,

so we could not really recognise in the beginning

the size of the problem.

I took a call from a contact of mine

inside the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, who said,

"You're going to have to move hotel. There are going to be street battles

"outside your hotel. Get out."

EXPLOSIONS

There were millions of people leaving.

The highways were full.

It was like millions of atoms had

been shaken and violently agitated.

It did feel like the end of days,

and probably, the whole of Ukraine

will be swallowed up.

Everyone was having these

existential conversations - "Do I stay? Do I go?"

We came to the shelter.

We had this communication device. It's a secure communication,

like a suitcase or something, with the video conferencing.

Er, US Embassy and the State Department, basically,

and the State Department said, "We prepared the helicopter",

so they kind of planned the evacuation operation.

At this stage, I'm thinking, we're going to have to get

Volodymyr Zelensky to a place of safety,

where he can go into some sort of either internal

or external exile and mastermind a resistance.

The security came and said, like, "We have bulletproof intel

"that...", you know, like, "..we're going to be surrounded

"within 40 minutes or so,

"so we have only 15 minutes to go, if we decide to go."

Zelensky brought us. There was the Prime Minister, Yermak, Sybiha...

There was, like, five guys, or six guys. He says, like, "Listen,

"everybody has his own family, his own life, so I'm not judging you.

"If you decide to leave now, leave now."

He says, like, "If we are not here,

"people will stop fighting."

It was a real decision...

..between death and life.

I think when the history of the 21st century is written,

that that is probably the most powerful short video of our time.

He was going to stay, and he was going to die.

He went from being a good leader to being a great leader,

to being Winston Churchill with an iPhone.

I... I was not surprised.

I know him.

It's his personality.

To find out more about Ukraine

and some of the influential people

whose stories have shaped it,

go to bbc.co.uk/zelensky,

and follow the links to the Open University's interactive gallery.