Original subtitles

WOMAN:

MAN:

WOMAN:

NEWSREADER: Good evening.

Could this be another example of a Russian being poisoned on UK soil?

A man in hospital tonight, Sergei Skripal,

a Russian convicted in Moscow for spying for Britain

and now living in the UK

is in a critical condition.

PUTIN:

WOMAN:

MAN: There are much, much quicker and easier ways to kill someone

than poison.

You generally use poison for one or both of two reasons -

one is deniability,

secondly is theatre.

And I think in this case, the Russians were looking for both.

They wanted to have a certain amount of deniability.

They wanted to be able to say, "Nothing to do with us".

But they also wanted to do it with a certain amount of smirk and twinkle.

In a way that actually we knew it really was them.

MAN: There's an expression in Russia that the fish rots from the head.

WOMAN: People quite often say,

"Oh, Putin must be the richest man in the world."

MAN 2: That's a direct strike at the very heart

of the whole system that Vladimir Putin has built.

MAN 3: So the only thing that they could have done

was to rig the election.

WOMAN 2: As far as Putin's concerned,

this is just one of the casualties of war.

(APPLAUSE) (LIVELY MUSIC)

He's about to sing, isn't he?

# I found my thrill

# On Blueberry Hill

(CHUCKLES)

# On Blueberry Hill

# When I found you

There was also Sharon Stone in the room, right?

# The moon stood still

Putin has a flare for these kinds of gestures.

He likes to surprise people and he was having some fun.

# My dreams came true

MAN: The Russian Constitution forbids anyone

to stay in power longer than eight years consecutively.

# But all of those vows we made

# Were never to be

So two presidential terms is a very clear-cut case.

You have to step down and some other person has to take your place

in the Kremlin.

# On Blueberry Hill. #

(APPLAUSE)

So, in 2008, Putin steps down.

He became the Prime Minister and the new President was selected.

Well, manually selected at that time

by Vladimir Putin as he is, as the new Russia's President.

All of a sudden, he was no longer the man behind the big desk.

He was no longer formally in power.

And I think he found this psychologically problematic.

This is a man who's having trouble coping with his new identity

as - technically speaking - the second-in-command.

How is he gonna be perceived?

Not just today and not just by Russians,

but tomorrow and by the world.

Medvedev is this pro-Western,

pro-progress, pro-modernisation person.

Russia was actually developing and moving in the right direction.

MAN: Putin, I think, discovered during Dmitri Medvedev's presidency

that Russia needed a strong hand on the tiller

and his was the only hand that... that would work.

He became convinced that, you know, the only way to protect Russia,

but also to protect his own power, his own wealth and everything else,

was to return to the Kremlin.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

(APPLAUSE)

GALEOTTI: That was, I think, a shocking moment

for a lot of Russians.

There was something about the brazenness of the process,

the fact it almost implied that the presidency

was just basically some little trinket

that could be exchanged between them.

And that, I think, very much set the scene

for why we saw such massive protests around the parliamentary elections

that followed.

REPORTER: The country is unusually tense today

because there are signs of change in the air.

WOMAN: This wasn't a presidential election.

These were parliamentary elections.

But it was important to Mr Putin and those around him

that they had the right parliament.

And it was also, to some extent, a dry run for the presidency

some months later.

FISHMAN: Emotion and feeling was so strong

that people were ready to vote anyone against Putin's party.

So the only thing that they could have done was to rig the election.

In Moscow alone, and these are independent estimates,

more than a million votes were simply stolen.

REPORTER: In Russia, Prime Minister Putin's party looks set for victory

after parliamentary elections today, albeit with a reduced majority...

REPORTER 2: The once-untouchable Vladimir Putin appeared,

looking more subdued than usual.

HILLARY CLINTON: We have serious concerns

about the conduct of those elections.

Independent political parties were denied the right to register.

And the preliminary report by the OSCE

cites election day attempts to stuff ballot boxes,

manipulate voter lists and other troubling practices.

MAN: This was by no means

the first election rigged under Vladimir Putin.

What made it different was that...

Of course, this was already the age of social media and smartphones

and so the news of this rigging

and the blatant nature of this rigging

spread throughout the country in literally hours.

(SIRENS WAIL)

FISHMAN: And this is when we understand

that something is going on.

That this moral rebellion against humiliation,

against lies, against corruption,

that this is real.

It was like this forgotten feeling

that you and others share the same emotion,

share the same feeling, share the same understanding

that you're together.

KARA-MURZA: One of the leaders of those protests was Boris Nemtsov.

Nemtsov was always never afraid to speak his own mind.

And he was absolutely brilliant in mobilising...

..mass protests on the streets of Russia.

KENDALL: These huge crowds coming out

first, protesting against fraud in the parliamentary elections,

but then after a few days, when they were not stopped,

it morphing into a much bigger call for, in the end, Putin to step down.

FISHMAN: He thought it would be an easy ride.

That he would simply get re-elected

and then rule Russia for what, 12 years again.

(CHEERING)

And that must have been cataclysmic for the Kremlin, I think.

When they're thinking,

"We've got presidential elections coming in just a few months' time.

"How are we going to handle it?"

First, yes, Putin was shocked, then he regrouped...

..and counter-attacked.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

REPORTER: Russians are going to the polls

to vote in the most controversial presidential election in decades.

The turnout is said to have been high so far.

REPORTER: Even his visit to the polling station ended

with three half-naked women being led away shouting,

"Putin is a thief."

There have already been thousands of allegations of fraud,

including this footage apparently showing a man

feeding ballot paper after ballot paper

into an automatic voting machine.

Just as polls closed in Kaliningrad in the far west

this big show began just outside the Kremlin.

(CHEERING)

It was a bit odd, really, 'cause it was a victory parade

when the polls had only just closed,

so they couldn't have possibly counted everything.

(CHEERING)

He couldn't conceal his emotion.

(CHEERING)

(SIREN BLARES)

REPORTER: The Russian government has strongly denied allegations

that it was involved in the killing of an opposition politician.

Boris Nemtsov was a former Deputy Prime Minister

and a prominent critic of President Vladimir Putin.

Last night he was shot four times in the back.

GURIEV: Mr Putin wants to find new basis for his new presidency,

because he has no vision, no future to offer to the people.

And now, economic growth is slowing down,

approval ratings are coming down.

From the peak they went down by 20 percentage points.

He is looking for a new idea he can offer to the Russian public.

WOMAN: In the beginning he'd managed to rule by saying,

"I'm not what came before. I'm a new, healthy Russia."

And then he felt like he needed something new.

So starting in, like, early 2013, I guess,

the beginning whispers of very public

anti-LGBT rhetoric from state officials started to emerge.

A year later you had the anti-gay propaganda laws.

You started to see vigilante justice all around the country

where you had groups that would form and lure gay men over apps

and then violently beat them up, film it and put it on the internet.

KENDALL: What Mr Putin wants to do

is to get at the working man and working woman

and he wants to make sure he keeps them on side.

And that he as president embodies the narrative

that Russia is up from its knees.

It's great again. It can take on the world.

And those pictures send that story.

So how do you go on doing that year after year after year?

GURIEV: Well, people know he's ageing.

And officially nobody says that Putin has plastic surgery.

Now, he occasionally disappears for a week or two.

KENDALL: So Putin always used to have a really quite bony face.

And suddenly his face was all puffy.

It certainly is true that he was very close to Berlusconi.

I've heard him talk very, very warmly about Mr Berlusconi.

So the idea that the Italian Prime Minister suggested to him

that he could help him with a little bit of Botox

from his plastic surgeon is entirely credible.

Sergei Magnitsky was a Moscow-based lawyer,

but you have to go back to Magnitsky's boss Bill Browder.

Bill Browder was a big investor in Russia

and then fell out with Putin.

Browder had been barred from Russia and set up in London,

but still had holding companies in Moscow,

which had been raided by Moscow tax police.

My offices were raided by 25 police officers

from the Moscow interior ministry.

I hired Sergei Magnitsky to investigate this case.

And what Sergei discovered was that

using the documents seized by the police,

the perpetrators had gone back to the tax authorities

and applied for a $230 million illegal tax refund.

After Sergei testified against these corrupt police officers,

some of the same police officers he testified against

came to his home, arrested him, and put him in pre-trial detention.

After about six months of consistent torture and abuse,

Sergei started to have health problems.

He'd developed terrible pains in his stomach,

and in 2009 Sergei Magnitsky went into critical condition.

Instead of putting him in the emergency room,

they put him in an isolation cell.

They chained him to a bed

and eight riot guards with rubber batons came into that cell

and beat him until he died.

He was 37 years old.

He left a wife and two children.

There's an expression in Russia, that the fish rots from the head.

In order for him to run the country,

Vladimir Putin needs the support of people below him -

officials who are extremely rich,

that are enforcers and implementers of Putin's criminal activities.

And then below them there's other people

that run the mechanics of this Mafia state.

The Magnitsky Act was a piece of legislation which I came up with

and I lobbied in the United States with the US Congress.

And the Magnitsky Act freezes assets and bans visas of the people

who killed Sergei Magnitsky

and the people who commit other gross human rights abuses.

(CAUTIOUS APPLAUSE)

So after the Magnitsky Act was passed in the United States,

Vladimir Putin wanted to come after me and come after Sergei Magnitsky.

So in July of 2013, he put us on trial in Moscow.

I wasn't in Moscow, I was here in London,

so I was on trial... in absentia.

And they'd killed Sergei Magnitsky three years earlier.

Well, during the trial, you had a courtroom with a prosecutor,

with a judge, and a cage with two empty seats.

One for me and one for Sergei.

It was the first ever trial against a dead man in the history of Russia.

They couldn't sentence Sergei to anything more than death.

They sentenced me to nine years in absentia.

(APPLAUSE)

PUTIN: Millions of citizens of Russia

are united by the Olympic dream.

Winter sports are very popular in Russia.

Our athletes have scored many victories

and have made major contributions to the Olympic movement.

Getting the Sochi Olympics was clearly a very big deal

for Vladimir Putin.

The 22nd Olympic Winter Games in 2014...

..are awarded to the city of Sochi!

(WILD CHEERING)

KENDALL: He wanted the world to see that Russia could put on

a huge logistical exercise and a big party and impress everyone,

as a sort of superpower -

but not in terms of oil and gas wealth or nuclear weapons,

but in terms of soft power.

In terms of culture and sport.

Sport plays a very, very important role in Soviet and Russian ideology.

Actually plays a very important role in any authoritarian ideology.

It is the biggest symbol of Russia

back at the centrestage of the world.

It's his big party.

(CHEERING)

And, of course, the event gets spoilt for him

by what's happening in Ukraine.

MAN: The Ukrainians start demonstrating

in the central square in Kiev.

They're flying the Ukrainian flag and the European Union flag.

They see Europe as less corruption, more rule of law,

and the prosperity that comes from less corruption

and more rule of law.

And the protest grows.

And it suddenly takes on the characteristics

of a political revolution.

Putin wants a regime in Ukraine which resembles his own

and the Ukrainians were saying,

"Goddammit, this is our country. We live here.

"We want a say in our own country's future."

(SHOUTING)

(EXPLOSIONS)

To lose Ukraine, from a Russian point of view, is a catastrophe.

REPORTER: Russia has warned that violent protests

in Ukraine's capital Kiev are growing out of control

after another night of clashes with police.

OSTROVSKY: He's angry.

He's furious, actually.

He's really, really furious.

This country's stealing his show.

Instead of the pictures of Russian triumphs...

..there are pictures of people being shot.

Ukraine totally overshadows his event.

FRIED: Putin moves fast.

Little green men appear in Crimea.

And he seizes it,

almost without a shot being fired.

HILLARY CLINTON: As President Obama has said,

the Russian intervention in Crimea violates international law.

And it is therefore of deep concern to the Unites States and our allies.

REPORTER: Russia controls Crimea now

but no-one knows what President Putin plans to do next.

REPORTER: You can see how all of this

is being orchestrated directly from Moscow

and we're seeing it unfold right here on the ground.

(GUNSHOTS)

FRIED: Putin tries to do the same thing in Eastern Ukraine.

And he sends more little green men across.

The Ukrainians fought back

and there's an actual Goddamn war between Ukraine and Russia.

REPORTER: The conflict between Russia and Ukraine may have claimed

the lives of more than 300 innocent air travellers.

A Malaysian Airlines jet appears to have been shot down.

OSTROVSKY: I don't think this was planned by Putin.

They didn't plan to down a civilian aircraft.

It's collateral damage in the situation of war.

The official line was that everybody in Russia,

99%, was supporting what Putin was doing.

And I will never forget...

..what I saw that day.

(MAN SHOUTS IN RUSSIAN)

When the whole boulevard ring in central Moscow was just filled

with thousands and thousands of people.

A sea of faces and flags as far as the eye could see.

Of Russians who came out to say,

"This is not my war. Not in my name."

Boris Nemtsov organised and led two marches of peace

against Putin's war.

Boris Nemtsov thought that he could be arrested

and put in prison for a long time.

As many Putin opponents are.

I do not think he or any of us would consider the possibility

that the most prominent leader of the opposition

would be gunned down on a bridge 200 yards from the Kremlin wall.

(SIREN WAILS)

(MAN SPEAKING RUSSIAN)

Anybody who's been to Moscow even once, knows that, you know,

you can't even stand for a few minutes on that bridge

without a plain clothes officer, a police officer,

running up to you and saying "What are you doing?"

This is the most protected area, not just in Moscow,

but probably in the whole of Europe.

There are dozens of television cameras installed around.

There are always security officers around and of course,

as opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov always had a, you know,

FSB people following him everywhere he went.

I find it impossible to believe that an action of such magnitude

as the assassination of the leader of the opposition,

a few hundred yards from the Kremlin wall,

could have been carried out on somebody's own initiative

without coordination from the very top.

I find that absolutely impossible to believe.

(CROWD CHANTS)

Every year around the date of the assassination of Boris,

there are marches of remembrance held in Moscow.

Thousands of people come to the streets to pay their respects.

Many of us went to the bridge and the spot of the murder

to lay some flowers and it was just, of course as you can imagine,

a mountain of flowers on that particular day.

(HELICOPTER WHIRRS)

Then we saw a government helicopter flying by

and intentionally lowering itself just over that spot with the flowers

so the rotor and the wind would throw everything away.

It's not enough for them to kill the man,

they're trying to kill the memory as well.

I consider it be the greatest privilege of my life

to have worked with him for more than 15 years.

Safety's not the word we associate with how we feel about what we do.

They've tried to kill me twice in the last five years.

This is from the second poisoning. This is February 2017.

And I am very fortunate to be sitting here and speaking to you,

because I did have about 5% chance both times I was poisoned.

Boris Nemtsov did not even have a 1% chance

when they shot those bullets in his back

on Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge.

(JET ENGINES WHINE)

OSTROVSKY: In Putin's mind, he is now engaged in this huge global battle

against American Western dominance.

I don't think he cares, frankly,

I don't think he cares about Russia's relationship with the West anymore.

You get to the point of sort of escalation of conflict

and you just slam the door and say, "Well, you know what? Fuck you."

KENDALL: If you're Mr Putin and you're looking at Europe now,

you're probably feeling pretty pleased with yourself.

Europe looks weak, and the United States too.

And we, Russia, like to think we look strong.

We are now going to overtake you,

just as China is going to overtake you.

It's a new world, it's a different world.

It's a non-Western world, and we're part of it.

So why are we now seeing sort of mini Putins springing up?

You now, Erdogan, President of the Philippines and so on.

Well, maybe it's partly because we are living in very uncertain times.

People are less sure about their identities

and the identities of their communities around them.

There's also the rise of automation, which is threatening people's jobs.

And so actually what a populist leader offers you,

which is a slightly nostalgic, very clearly defined,

slightly assertive, let's circle the wagons kind of feel

fits all those scenarios.

(CHEERING)

Putin was very nice to me. He said, "Donald Trump is a genius."

Well, I'll take that, right? Not gonna...

Hey, let me tell ya, he's not gettin' anything for it, OK?

He said, "Donald Trump is a genius.

"And Donald Trump is going to be the great leader of the party."

So he said that. I don't know if he meant it.

Probably did to be honest with you.

He sees crowd like this, why not?

In some ways Putin sees President Trump

as someone he can manipulate.

Our relationship has never been worse than it is now.

However, that changed as of about four hours ago,

I really believe that.

President Putin, thank you very much.

If you could have seen the cartoon balloon

coming out of Putin's head at that moment,

I think it would have read, "What an easy mark."

It's clear to me that the Russians did in fact hack into the DNC.

REPORTER: An ex-MI6 officer is understood to have

compiled the report,

which contains unverified allegations

that Russian security officials

have compromising material on the president elect.

REPORTER: Was his victory tinged by Moscow's interference?

Did his campaign collude with Putin?

The Russians intended to meddle, and they meddled.

REPORTER: Garbage online, much of it from Russia,

and deliberately designed to cause trouble

is evidently polluting public discourse.

(CROWD CHANTS) What do we want? Brexit!

When do we want it? Now!

REPORTER: When will you release the Russian report?

I... let me tell you...

This is the report into whether or not there was Russian interference

or any kind of influence.

There is absolutely no evidence that I know of...

If that's the case, then why not release it?

MAN: It's the largest humanitarian disaster since World War Two.

It could stop tomorrow morning

if Russia were to behave according to any norm

or any standard of decency.

REPORTER: Moscow dismissed claims of civilian casualties

as an information war.

OSTROVSKY: Putin doesn't understand that Western societies

do actually put life at the centre.

That actually individual life of a person who has a name,

has a family, has children, is the most important thing.

And it will be always more important in Western politics

than any great state interests.

REPORTER: Counter terrorism officers have take charge

of the investigation into the suspected poisoning

of a former Russian agent and his daughter in Salisbury on Sunday.

Sergei Skripal had been convicted in Russia 12 years ago

of passing secrets to MI6.

Well, in Moscow, the Russian government has vehemently denied

any suggestion of involvement.

Some people might say a human life is worth more than five pennies.

Police say, "Shocking and utterly appalling"

that a woman has died after being exposed to a nerve agent

in Wiltshire.

Dawn Sturgess was contaminated not far from where a former Russian spy

and his daughter were poisoned in March.

GALEOTTI: I honestly think as far as Putin's concerned,

this is just one of the casualties of war.

People will die.

That's the way wars are.

She was an unfortunate person, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

REPORTER: Dawn Sturgess was a mother of three.

Today, they and her parents are mourning her.

(BEEP)

(CAMERA SHUTTERS CLICK)

FRIED: Once you have been king

and done the things you've done in order to stay king,

you can't retire.

There's no rule of law in Russia.

Putin's made sure of that.

He has used the absence of the rule of law to sustain himself in power

and punish his enemies.

He thinks he can have a nice retirement?

You think? really?

Subtitles Diego Moraes(oakislandtk) www.opensubtitles.org