The Zelensky Story (2024) s01e02 Episode Script
Episode 2
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 pushedpushed 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
andcan'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
tobuild 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 Iwe 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'sto 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 Russthe 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
tillnot for any time soon."
But I couldn't say
Ukraine will neverjoin 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 somesome 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 isthe 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 towestern 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
weattacked 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.
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 pushedpushed 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
andcan'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
tobuild 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 Iwe 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'sto 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 Russthe 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
tillnot for any time soon."
But I couldn't say
Ukraine will neverjoin 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 somesome 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 isthe 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 towestern 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
weattacked 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.