Original subtitles

The endlessly fertile black earth.

For centuries, Ukraine'’s blessing.

But also its curse.

From East to West, the invaders came.

First, the Mongols,

then the Poles.

Then the Turks.

Then the Russians.

Hungry for grain, hungry for bread,

the invaders conquered the land and reaped its harvest.

Empire after empire stained the earth with blood and ash.

It's not an accident that the Ukrainian national anthem

the first line is "“Ukraine has not yet died."”

Your country is living on the edge,

if that's how you celebrate your existence.

We're still here! We're not dead quite yet!

I remember,

my grandmother was from central Russian-ruled Ukraine.

My grandfather was from western Polish-ruled Ukraine.

She was Orthodox, he was Catholic.

and one of the most intense debates,

which raged almost daily around their kitchen table was:

"“Who repressed us more?"”

In 1932 and 1933,

Stalin starved to death millions of Ukrainian farmers

to crush the country'’s dream of independence.

Millions more were killed during World War II

in the Nazi-Soviet battles over Ukraine.

Just like Stalin,

Hitler thought Ukraine was a kind of breadbasket

that he needed for an empire.

The Soviet Union starts when Russia and Ukraine

are brought together,

and the Soviet Union ends

when Russia and Ukraine come apart.

Newly independent Ukraine

was a country still ruled by its communist era bosses.

They didn't call themselves communists anymore,

but they were still in charge.

The Orange Revolution was very brave and very promising.

What happened next is incredibly disillusioning

and very sad.

The government they want comes to power

and it does so badly at actually running the country

that Yanukovych,

who had failed to become president fraudulently,

is then elected as President of Ukraine.

A last minute about turning Ukraine

has seen the government suspend a trade pact with

the European Union just a week before it was set to be signed.

The government has now issued an order

calling off parliamentary votes on the deal

saying it will renew active dialogue with Russia.

Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych

refused to sign the deal

despite last-ditch efforts by European leaders

to persuade him overnight.

That'’s prompted anger.

I live not far away from here.

So, I was able actually to come to Maidan three times a day.

Sometimes two times a day.

Sometimes stay some hours in the night.

I liked especially the fact that students

wanted to have a nonpolitical protest.

Then I became very optimistic

thinking it's much easier to put a small country in order

than a huge country in order.

Those who tried to save themselves

were caught, thrown to the ground and beaten with sticks.

Some of the protesters escaped towards St. Michael'’s Square.

A monk invited them to take refuge in the monastery.

They barricaded the door from within.

The young people taking refuge in the monastery say

they do not intend to go home.

After this morning, they'’re no longer afraid of anything.

They felt physically dutied

living in Yanukovych's Ukraine.

You couldn't live an honorable life.

Paying bribes, accepting bribes.

You had to be corrupt.

Especially for this younger generation.

People who came at the age

after the Soviet Union had collapsed.

People who knew the West,

they knew you didn't have to live like that.

And a lot of this was: "“I will not live this way.

I refuse to live this way."”

When you have a revolution, whether peaceful or violent,

you have of course

destruction of so called peaceful rhythm of life,

because you don't know what to expect next.

You don't know how the protest will finish,

and you don't know whether it is dangerous or not

to be next to the protest.

Tetyana Chornovol told police her car was stopped

by a gang of men near Kyiv just after midnight.

She was dragged from the vehicle,

assaulted and left in a ditch.

She suffered a broken nose, concussion and numerous bruises.

The reporter had just published an article

on the personal wealth of Ukraine'’s interior minister.

Ukrainian members of parliament on Thursday

voted for a draft law

that threatens fundamental freedoms

including the right to assembly.

Opposition members tried to block the vote but failed.

The main two things which shocked me

that at some point, people lost sense of humor on Maidan.

And almost next day they lost fear of death.

This is still something which puzzles me

because I cannot decipher the psychological instruments

which force people to forget about security, safety,

about their personal life,

personal obligations to their families and to the closed ones,

and how they become ready to die for their country

which was always corrupt.

The BBC can'’t independently verify this footage

but video has emerged which appears to show

president Yanukovych's entourage

fleeing from his luxurious mansion outside Kyiv...

This afternoon crowds of curious Ukrainians

streamed into Yanukovych'’s sprawling compound.

It'’s a huge estate. I mean,

they say it'’s half the size of Monaco,

costs millions of Euros in making.

A lot of protesters are very unhappy

that Yanukovych had such a place to live

given that living standards in this country are so low

that average monthly salary is around 300 Euros.

What was the level of Yanukovych'’s corruption?

it'’s hard to compare in hard numbers how Yanukovych

ranks to his predecessors,

but Yanukovych seems to have been in a class by himself.

I've seen one account that suggests

in four years he stole perhaps ten billion dollars.

There was never anything quite like the Maidan.

There was never a revolutionary movement

on behalf of unified Europe before.

People never died in the name of a united Europe.

Before that never happened.

There's never been a movement this far East in Europe

which was chiefly about the rule of law.

America is officially calling a "“Russian invasion of Ukraine."”

"“This is a Russian invasion."” The US says.

There is no doubt these are Russian forces

roaming the roads here in Ukraine'’s Crimea.

There was an opportunity that I think Putin saw

given what was going on in Kyiv,

to basically return Crimea to Russian control.

A few days after Yanukovych fled Kyiv,

we saw the appearance of what the Ukrainians called

"“little green men."

Combat soldiers who, when you watch them on television,

by the way they handled their weapons,

they were clearly professional soldiers.

Very well-trained professional soldiers.

They were in Russian combat uniform, but no insignia.

The military invasion of Russia to Ukrainian Crimea

was absolutely predictable.

Putin started to think about the annexation of Crimea

immediately after the war with Georgia in 2008.

And Vladimir Putin knew for sure the West

would not be intervening in the military sense

to this situation in Crimea in Ukraine.

What you've seen in terms of Russian action

is really egregious.

It's a land grab.

You can't find any other instance

where a European state has used military force

basically to change borders and take territory

from another country.

For Vladimir Putin annexation of Crimea

was to give more energy to this myth

that Ukraine and Russia are the same nation.

And he thought it would be only beginning,

because he planned annex not only Crimea.

He really thinks that Ukraine doesn't exist.

Having so effortlessly gobbled up Crimea,

it'’s very easy to see

that Putin at that point was encouraged to keep going.

There's a Russian saying: "“the eating increases the appetite."”

And I think it applies very much to Putin.

Reuters has reported eyewitness accounts

of the appearance of Russian army troops without insignia

in East Ukraine.

After a firefight near the Russian border

of the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk,

pro-Russian militants seized the police headquarters.

This is Horlivka. They'’re storming the building.

Throwing rocks through windows.

And the police inside are throwing out smoke grenades

and stun grenades.

When I was watching the Russian invasion of Eastern Ukraine,

for me it was deja vu.

Not long before I had finished writing a book about

the Stalinization, Sovietization of Eastern Europe in 1945.

The methods were exactly the same.

It was what Russians call 'maskirovka'.

Pretend they'’re not really Russians.

Create fake political parties.

Create fake slogans.

Recruit local criminals

to undermine what existing power there is.

This is what the pro-Russian revolution in Eastern Ukraine

looks like from the inside.

The idea was to create the semblance

of a separatist movement.

Persuade a few people to join it.

Persuade the outside world that that'’s what it was.

All under the guise of it being de facto Russian invasion.

Of course now it'’s more than clear that's what it was.

Ukraine'’s army has launched an aggressive military operation

as the government tries to regain control of several...

Ukrainian army setting up their positions on the road

into Slovyansk, checking vehicles...

I think Putin'’s original goal was to divide Ukraine.

What he didn'’t expect was pushback from the Ukrainians.

After Crimea was so easily conquered,

he expected to walk into Odessa and other cities

and have exactly the same reaction.

And I think what he has never understood, and this has always

been hard for Russians to understand, is that

there is such a thing as a Ukrainian national identity.

There are reports that the Ukrainian army

moved forward this morning.

But we've heard from reporters

that Russian groups had reestablished positions.

Ukraine has become a testing ground for the Russian military.

But with one very significant modern circumstance,

additional condition.

And that'’s the Propaganda War.

When I look at what Russian propaganda is spreading,

I wonder at the power of Photoshop.

How Photoshop can be very easily used to distort the picture.

The massive lies spread by the Russian propaganda,

even before the war started,

were a key factor in

destabilizing situation in Ukraine.

During the three months of armed clashes

in the Donbas region,

the Kyiv authorities have not been able to quell

the uprising of the People'’s militia.

Inept command, thousands of dead soldiers

and a critical shortage of funding

does not give the Kyiv regime any hope for winning.

Why do Americans need this war?

All wars have a propaganda and disinformation element.

This one is nothing new.

What we've seen, over the last two years,

is a massive propaganda campaign

and a very-very successful disinformation campaign.

...Russia does not only protect its national interests,

but seeks to prevent the outbreak of World War Three.

The Russians understand western media

far better than the western media understands itself,

and they play to the western media's short attention span.

If you keep track, you'll see actors and actresses

playing different roles in different places.

They just move from one place to another.

If you keep track, you know what'’s going on.

But in the flood of events, what happens is the Russians do that,

and then they do something else.

And each is treated as a separate story

or ignored as part of the noise.

As long as the Russian government can always

have its message out there,

it will get it covered.

As outrageous as it may be.

Statements that are just simply untrue.

A Malaysian airliner with 295 people on board

crashes in Eastern Ukraine.

We'’ll be live across the world

assessing the impact of this disaster...

...bound for Cuala Lumpur,

roughly three hours later Ukrainian

air traffic controllers lost contact with the plane.

Kremlin-backed forces boasted online

of shooting down a Ukrainian military transport plane,

before hastily removing the posts

after realizing minutes later they had mistakenly shot down

the international passenger flight.

The passengers onboard that plane were from all over Europe,

Asia, even Australia.

But most of them on board, 154 of the 295 onboard,

were Dutch.

Also, disturbing reports that as many as 80 children

could have been onboard.

Another disturbing layer to this already horrific story.

There were truly horrific pictures of people

from Donetsk and Luhansk

raiding the wreckage from this downed plane.

Had this gone on for very long,

it would have become obvious to everyone I think,

if nothing else had occured,

that the Russian government bore

ultimate responsibility for this.

But it didn't happen that way.

When the Malaysian airplane went down over Ukraine,

that was something they didn't plan,

they didn't mean for that to happen.

And so they just threw up a lot of messages.

The Americans did it, the CIA did it,

it was the same Malaysian plane that went down over the Pacific.

The CIA dredged it up, filled it with corpses.

They have these ideas,

and the point of those ideas is not that anybody believes them,

but that a real tragedy involving real human beings

becomes just a media event.

Returning to the Netherlands

where their tragic journey began,

the first of the victims of Flight MH17.

40 bodies, all of them yet to be identified,

carried out of the cargo planes,

with the dignity and respect they deserve.

It took the shooting down of a Western airplane,

it took the deaths of Europeans and Australians

to really wake the West up to what Putin was.

And to the lawlessness that he represented.

And to the fact that that was really dangerous

not just for Ukrainians,

but for everybody else.

We ask our partners not to lift sanctions

until Ukraine takes over the control of its entire territory

starting with the East of Ukraine and ending with Crimea.

Crimea was, is, and will be a part of Ukraine.

Mister Putin, you will never win the fight against the nation,

united Ukrainian nation.

Despite the war, despite everything,

the main problem in Ukraine is rule of law.

And if that problem could be solved,

then not only would all the other problems in Ukraine

fall into proportion, resolve themselves,

but also that would be the best possible result

for the rest of Eastern Europe or for that matter, just Europe.

Because getting over the hump from corruption to rule of law

is a lot harder than having a revolt or a revolution.

Ukraine faces a very difficult future.

They have these two big challenges.

One is that they've got to restructure their economy,

to put on the decentralization.

There's a lot of things they need to do

to make Ukraine a state that functions better

in terms of meeting the requirements of the population.

And they have to do it while they are engaged

in this military conflict

with the separatists and the Russians in the east.

Ukrainian society is united more than before.

And it was consolidated by Maidan events.

They are together. And it doesn'’t matter whether they are

Jews, Greeks, Bulgarians, Hungarians.

The only way forward for Ukraine,

and the only way to move towards Europe,

is to build a political nation.

Where everybody feels equal and everybody feels Ukrainian

as in England, everyone feels British,

whether they are Indian, Pakistanis,

ex-Polish, Russian, or English, or Scottish.

Ukraine'’s become a piece of a bigger struggle

which I think is really going to be about the future

of European democracy.

Can European democracy even survive, into the 21st Century?

Ukraine is really the first step in a Russian

attempt and effort to undermine and destroy the West.

And this is said openly in Russia.

You don't need to be a conspiracy theorist

to think that.

Ukraine is an illustration and a demonstration

of Russia's national goals.

Precisely for the reasons that Putin fears and opposes

the rise of a democratic, prosperous rule of law Ukraine,

we should be doing everything we can to encourage it.

I am convinced that the path to democracy in Russia

goes through Ukraine.