Russia's Wars (2023) s01e03 Episode Script

1
Devastating wars.
Pitiless rulers
in pursuit of
power over centuries.
When Russia takes up arms,
the world holds its breath.
The Kremlin - for centuries,
the centre of Russian power.
In the magnificent Saint George's Hall,
a reception is held to honor war veterans.
They served under Stalin and
still mourn the loss of his empire.
As does their
leader, Vladimir Putin.
Flashback to the year 2000.
Putin springs a surprise.
He wants to reintroduce Stalin's
national anthem from 1944.
According to Putin, the USSR's old national
anthem will reconcile the past and present.
Even in 2000 he was
thinking about the Soviet Union
would probably return somehow.
This is a real surprise.
The guests don't quite
know what to make of it.
The tune is familiar,
but the words are new.
Now it's about love
for the fatherland,
not as in Stalin's time,
love for the party.
In the 20th century Stalin is the
most successful Russian ruler.
And so, yeah,
Putin admires that.
Is it just symbolism? Or does Putin
see himself as Stalin's successor?
Is he planning to resurrect
the Soviet empire?
November 1989: The
fall of the Berlin Wall.
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, head
of the Soviet government and of the party,
has permitted a peaceful
revolution in East Germany.
More than half a million Soviet
soldiers are stationed in the DDR.
They remain in their barracks.
The end of Soviet dominance
is now only a matter of time.
Gorbachev tries desperately
to keep on top of events.
In March 1990, the Soviet star falls in
Vilnius, Lithuania proclaims independence.
The Kremlin responds with tanks.
TRANSLATOR: This deployment was a last
desperate attempt to use military power to
maintain, at least in part,
the unity of the Soviet Union.
The three Baltic states Estonia, Latvia
and Lithuania leave the empire first
following uprisings in Georgia.
It too declares independence
and elects a new president.
But now citizens loyal to Moscow take up
arms, chiefly in two pro-Russian regions.
Hundreds die in clashes with
the new presidential guard.
August 1991, a coup against Gorbachev to
prevent the adoption of a new "Union Treaty".
By granting wide ranging
freedoms to individual republics,
the Soviet Union. But the
conservative plotters are too attached to
old Soviet state and so
speed its ultimate demise.
TRANSLATOR: It was mainly the people who wanted
to hold on to the idea of the Soviet Union.
People from the KGB and the
military too, that is, the hardliners.
Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian
Soviet Republic, is the man of the hour.
He opposes the coup.
He appears to be
standing up for democracy.
Mikhail Gorbachev resigns.
Yeltsin attacks him because Gorbachev
refuses to abandon the Soviet Union.
For Yeltsin, it's
already history.
He dissolves the Communist
Party and then the Soviet state itself.
The red flag is no more.
After the three Baltic states, 11 other
Soviet republics declare their independence,
the Soviet Union shrinks
to the Russian Federation.
Russian troops leave the former East Germany,
weapons and soldiers return to Russia.
The government of newly unified Germany
pays Moscow 12 billion deutschmarks.
The money doesn't
flow to the military.
It's used to save the whole
country from bankruptcy.
ry. over to Russia the nuclear
weapons stationed on their territo
. their full sovereignty and
the inviolability of their borders
The military budget in the final years of the
Soviet Union is between $200 and $250 billion.
In the 1990s, annual Russian
expenditure drops to less than $20 billion.
The euphoria for Yeltsin and
the new freedoms doesn't last.
The economy hits rock bottom.
Russians associate democracy
with crisis and decline.
For centuries, the Caucasus,
with its ethnic and religious mix,
has been a focus
of political turmoil.
Georgia is now independent.
ion. in the Northern Caucasus will
remain inside the Russian Federat
In December 1994, the Russian
army marches into Chechnya.
They're there to fight the separatists
who've declared independence.
But why does Yeltsin
unleash this war, and why now?
The powerful security
service plays a crucial role.
The first Chechen war was
organised by KGB, by the FSB.
TRANSLATOR: These people thought Russia
shouldn't develop in a democratic way.
It must become involved in a
political provocation, in a war.
The war runs out of control.
The troops are unmotivated,
their weapons obsolescent.
Yeltsin faces massive criticism.
I put a lot of blame on Yeltsin's war in
'94 because that was completely unnecessary.
Yeltsin himself said,
"You take all the independence you want", and
so they said, "Fine, we want to be independent,"
as they've been wanting for the
whole history of Russia since the Tsars.
And he said, "No, no, I don't really
mean it. I don't mean it for you."
Hundreds of soldiers
are taken prisoner.
It's months before they are
reunited with their mothers.
Many are less than 20 years old.
Some have only just been
redeployed from East Germany.
The troops in Chechnya were
mainly conscripts and elite units.
home. dead conscripts caused
Yeltsin very serious political problems at
Thousands of soldiers
are killed on both sides.
I interrogated a young
boy, 17 years old.
By the way, he was a
clever, widely read boy.
I asked him only one question,
"Why did you go to fight?"
He said, "I hate this war
and I don't want to fight.
I fight because all my
classmates are fighting.
I remember some films about World War
Two when the whole class went to fight."
Litvinenko was then an
army officer in Chechnya.
Later, he becomes a
career officer in the KGB.
In 1995, many victims of the
Chechen war disappear in mass graves.
Separatists talk of a genocide
against the civilian population.
The result is Islamist
terrorism in Russia.
In the run up to the 1995 presidential
election, Yeltsin agrees a ceasefire.
Russian troops withdraw,
leaving behind scorched earth.
Yeltsin was extremely unpopular,
but Democrats stopped to support him.
Actually, Yeltsin should be
investigated for war crimes
committed by the Russian army.
To the surprise of many,
Yeltsin is re-elected.
But he has lost the Chechen war and
is making no progress with the West.
Back in July 1990, German Chancellor
Helmut Kohl visits the Caucasus.
He's here to seize an opportunity
offered by the fall of the wall:
German reunification.
Mikhail Gorbachev
makes a concession.
A united Germany
can stay in NATO.
The Soviets, however, receive a verbal assurance
that NATO won't expand any further eastwards.
The existence of this promise
remains in dispute to this day.
It isn't mentioned in the 2 plus 4
Treaty on German reunification.
Of course, they didn't put it in because
they thought that those handshake,
you know how they do it
in the old world, is just
going to be good enough.
TRANSLATOR: There's
no document recording this.
It was free thinking
in the euphoria
of reunification at the
end of the Cold War.
George Bush was clear.
TRANSLATOR: They
didn't win the Cold War.
We did.
Good morning, everybody.
aw Pact are Poland, Hungary and
Czechoslovakia, former members of the Wars
invited to join the alliance,
seriously upsetting Moscow.
The then US Secretary of Defence was
opposed to the eastward extension of NATO.
Much too risky.
Danger of escalation.
We shouldn't rub Russia's nose in it too hard,
in the time of its post-imperial decline.
with the accession of Poland,
the Czech Republic and Hungary,
Alliance territory has
shifted to the East.
Did Bill Clinton trick Yeltsin?
Nobody tricked anyone.
Russia was weak.
Russia didn't veto it, didn't
say absolutely no way.
Maybe they could
have delayed it.
Maybe they could have come
up with a stronger counter offer.
The Russians
didn't do that in '97.
The conflict over NATO's eastward
expansion will affect Russia's
relations with the
West for years to come.
February 1999, the Kremlin.
President Yeltsin at an
awards ceremony for officers.
The only man in civilian
clothes is Vladimir Putin.
He has risen fast.
Once a KGB lieutenant colonel in
East Germany, he was deputy mayor in
St. Petersburg before moving
to the center of power in Moscow.
Now, Putin is head of the
FSB, successor to the KGB.
His Petersburg team has come
with him to the security service.
I understood who was in control
of the Federal Security Service.
It was Putin and his friends.
They were running the country.
I realized we
couldn't keep silent.
So my friends and I
held a press conference.
Litvinenko and others publicly
accused their employers, the FSB,
and thus Putin, of
ordering political murders.
He says he himself received such
an order which he refused to carry out.
Fearing the FSB's wrath, Litvinenko
and his family flee to London.
The interviews he recorded there in
2001 and 2002 give a unique insight
into Putin's career, from someone
who knew and worked with him.
In November 2006, FSB agents
lure Litvinenko to London's Millennium
Hotel, where they poison
him with radioactive Polonium.
Weeks later, he
dies a painful death.
Shortly before Litvinenko's death, the journalist
Anna Politkovskaya, is murdered in Moscow.
She has repeatedly
sharply criticized Putin.
Political murder has always
been the stock-in-trade of the KGB.
Now it sees a renaissance
with Putin's FSB.
Under Putin, the FSB takes over some of the
Army's role, in particular, border security.
In the Yeltsin years, the army
shrinks from 5 million to 1.7 million.
The FSB's ranks swell
from 100,000 to 288,000.
The Russian army is
only partly operational.
There's too little money
to develop new weapons.
And Yeltsin hasn't learned any lessons
from the military disaster in Chechnya.
In August 1999, he appoints
Vladimir Putin, his new prime minister.
Putin is hardly known outside
Moscow and St Petersburg.
It's not clear how he can win the
upcoming parliamentary election.
It seems the FSB has a
plan to boost his popularity.
Immediately following his appointment
and presumably with Yeltsin's
approval, Putin starts
a new war in Chechnya.
Russia breaks
the 1996 ceasefire.
Putin flies to Chechnya in a
fighter jet - that goes down well.
The previously anonymous politician is
leading the nation's fight against terrorism.
A few weeks later, a Moscow housing
estate is shaken by terrorist blasts.
More than 300 people are killed.
Putin immediately
blames Chechen terrorists.
It's the escalation he needs.
This was the first major
terrorist attack in Russia.
And everybody was frightened.
Everybody was expecting more
and more buildings to be blown up.
And on 23rd of September, a local
militia found an explosive device
in an apartment
building in Ryazan.
The night before, local residents had seen
strangers dragging sacks into the building.
The police make three arrests.
The men are
apparently FSB agents.
In the cellar of the building, the police
find sacks with explosives and a timer.
But then two days later, Moscow
comes up with a different explanation.
It was a security test, and the
sacks contain nothing but sugar.
? Russian citizens to polish
Putin's image as an anti-terrorist
Ryazan was not a training exercise, but
an attempt to commit an act of terrorism.
They were caught red handed.
The FSB is a
terrorist organization.
My assumption is
that it was the FSB.
I wouldn't put it past them.
a war Putin to sacrifice his own
people to have the justification for
and stabilize his own
position inside the country.
I wouldn't put
it past him at all.
Putin immediately orders bombing
raids on the Chechen capital, Grosny.
He says he'll hunt down the terrorists
if necessary, "Even in the shit house."
He gets the headlines he wants Russian
troops proceed with the utmost brutality.
TRANSLATOR: This way of waging war against
the civilian population has a long tradition.
It has a lot to do with the way the
army has been trained to maintain the
government's authority
inside the country by force.
This violent, brutal policy was
applied in Putin's Chechen war in the
way the city of Grosny was
virtually razed to the ground.
t it is form of war is in part the
result of a failure of leadership, bu
also a consciously
accepted form of lawlessness,
a lack of accountability,
because any crime
committed will not be
punishable in Russia itself.
adopted as a conscious form of
psychological warfare to undermine
the resistance of the civilian
population and of the enemy's military.
Putin regularly visits
the troops in Chechnya.
He praises the fighters
and distributes gifts.
At home, his popularity soars.
The FSB's plan is succeeding.
The people wanted
a leader like that.
They got it.
They supported him.
They killed people in Chechnya.
And everybody kept silent.
At the end of 1999, Yeltsin resigns
and makes Putin acting president.
With that, he takes
over the nuclear codes.
But Putin hasn't yet
achieved his goal.
He has to win the presidential
election of March 2000.
The KGB were making a decision
that clearly they needed a figurehead.
They needed somebody who was going to take
over the reins but be manipulated by them.
And this person that they
chose was Vladimir Putin.
Vladimir Putin was a mere lieutenant
colonel. He was a kind of nobody.
regain planned change, a transition
of power so that the KGB, FSB, could
its prominence, and its dominance
in Russia after Yeltsin was gone.
They became successful,
unfortunately, for all of us.
And now we are dealing with the
problem created by that success.
A reception for the heads of
the armed forces of the Kremlin,
one of Putin's first
official engagements.
He promises to strengthen the army, to
give them more respect and more money.
Russia's political capital rests
on the strength of its armed forces.
That was important in the Tsar's empire,
in the Soviet Union, in the Cold War,
and it's still important now.
Why is Russia still important?
Certainly not because of its moribund
economy. For its natural resources, sure.
But also because of its
military, its nuclear weapons.
Election night, March 2000. Putin has won
the presidential election in the first round.
Where is he taking the country?
The swearing-in ceremony, extravagant
as anything from the time of the Romanoffs.
A new Czar is born.
Among the guests, somewhat lost,
Mikhail Gorbachev.
Putin channels a lot of ideas and
ambitions from the Romanoff dynasty.
In many ways, he's very similar to Nicholas
I, who outwitted the West for 20 or 30 years
and really embraced internally
and the ideas of Orthodoxy,
nationality and empire.
So he takes what he needs from both the
Romanoff empire and the Stalinist empire.
view that the Russian empire before
1917 is another twist again on his
the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest
geo-political disaster of the 20th century.
The young president
arouses plenty of enthusiasm.
It feels like the
beginning of a new age.
Putin guarantees the autonomy of Chechnya
and installs an indigenous president,
Akhmad Kadryov, in Grosny.
After his murder in 2004, his
son, Ramzan, takes his place.
Ramzan still controls most of
Chechnya, as Moscow's brutal proxy
An international
memorial ceremony at sea.
sk after the presidential election,
Russia's nuclear submarine Kur
sinks when one of its
own torpedoes explodes.
The Kursk was the
pride of the Russian navy.
All 118 crew die.
The Kursk goes
down in 100m of water.
If they had raised her upright, she
would have reared 60m out of the water.
ide. don't have the capability to
free their own sailors trapped ins
It's really disastrous for the public
image of Russia's armed forces.
Wives and mothers of the
crew wait and hope for rescue.
But Putin refuses
help from abroad.
He only meets bereaved
relatives 11 days after the accident.
Empathy for those who perished
and their families, isn't his strength.
Silence about the dead is a tradition that
reaches far back, at least into Soviet times.
Murmansk, base of the
Russian northern fleet.
Nearby, a graveyard for
dozens of nuclear submarines.
Radioactive scrap.
At the turn of the new century,
Russia's navy is in catastrophic shape.
It's a metaphor for the
state of the armed forces
after almost two decades
of failure to modernize.
Those reforms that did
take place were really cuts
in soldiers wages, if they
were paid at all and out of
date, inadequately
maintained equipment.
In the first decade
of the Putin era,
military expenditure
continuously rises
from about $10
billion in the year 2000
to more than 50 billion in 2009.
New weapons, like short range
Iskander missiles, are to bring
Russian forces up to
the level of the West.
But a significant part of the military
budget is absorbed by endemic corruption.
June 2001, the first meeting between
the new man in the Kremlin and
a US President, George
W Bush is delighted.
I look the man in the eye.
I found it to be very
straightforward and trustworthy.
I was able to get
a sense of his soul
When George Bush looked
in his eyes and saw his soul,
which is bizarre because Putin's eyes are
the most impenetrable you can ever imagine.
He was young, he was unknown,
and this played a positive role
for him, being accepted
by the Western community.
Let me put it this way,
by the Western leaders.
In September 2001, Putin addresses
the Bundestag in Berlin, in German.
His presentation of a new Russia, open
to the world receives a standing ovation.
A new beginning or a coldly
calculated piece of make-believe.
The real Putin is an FSB thug.
He always was,
and he always will be.
of services apparatus of that kind
of government and you do the sorts
aganda Germany, which is about
infiltration and manipulation and prop
and spying.
entions. beginning to, disguise
their real feelings and their real int
ponry. Nazi Germany in 2002, Putin
dispenses with a big display of wea
It's more of a festival
for army veterans.
In any case, the Red Army
doesn't have much new to show.
The atmosphere
is almost peaceful.
Just two years later, Putin reveals Russia's
latest weapons at a Moscow air show.
military. see firsthand the renewed
strength and confidence of Russia's
Putin is massively rearming.
That goes for Russia's
nuclear arsenal too.
Ukraine's president, Putin's ally, Leonid
Kuchma, is reaching the end of his term.
Two men are competing
to be his successor,
Moscow loyalist Viktor Yanukovych, and
opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko.
Yushchenko has distanced
himself from Moscow.
He wants to lead
Ukraine towards the West.
He wants his
country to join NATO.
Estonia, Latvia,
Lithuania, Bulgaria,
Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia
all recently joined NATO.
From Russia's perspective, Ukrainian
membership must be thwarted at all costs.
That includes assassination.
Unknown persons try to poison
pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko.
Doctors in a specialist
Vienna clinic save his life.
Badly scarred,
he returns to the
campaign in Kyiv.
But by now, this is known that
these were Russian operatives
who were behind this
attempt and that they escaped
back to Russia and Russia, of
course, refused to extradite them.
Yushchenko gains a
strong sympathy vote.
He wins the election against
Yanukovych and against Moscow.
January 2005, the new
Ukrainian president is sworn in.
But his much vaunted Orange
Revolution gets bogged down.
Ukraine is still
corrupt and polarized.
In February 2007, Putin travels to the
European Security Conference in Munich.
The tone of his speech
is extremely blunt.
The West is ignoring
Russia's interests.
Is this the New World Order?
He complains once more about the broken
promise not to expand NATO eastwards.
He took his mask off and
started to be angry and ugly.
But this goes again
with KGB training.
They're nice, if it's
needed to be nice.
They are terrible, if it's
needed to be terrible.
And they are dangerous and ready
to kill if it's demanded from them.
Putin is most concerned about the
alleged dangers to Russia's security,
but in fact, it's all about
the survival of his regime.
This secret group
photo from 2008
shows the top officials of the
FSB, Russia's de facto rulers.
Security in Russia is not defined as national
security, but the security of the regime.
him. of the security of the regime,
of Putin and the people around
Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two
pro-Russian provinces of Georgia,
are fighting for
their independence.
In August 2008, a Russian army invades Georgia
to help South Ossetia fight Georgian troops.
It's also a demonstration of power
aimed at NATO, which has long been
eyeing Georgia and Ukraine as
future members of the alliance.
They said both countries will be
NATO members one day, but not when.
It was clear to Russia's
leaders this must be hindered.
Doesn't fit the image of Russia is a great power
with spheres of influence that it controls.
Once the war is over,
the Kremlin recognizes Abkhazia and
South Ossetia as independent states.
The same policy they'll
later use in Ukraine.
Russia's attack on Georgia is mainly conducted
through Abkhazian and Ossetian territory.
ad. collapse of the Soviet Union
when Russian forces were used abro
Nothing happened.
The West did not
react to this invasion.
And for Putin, this was an
invitation to proceed further.
The limited international reaction to
the invasion of Georgia encourages
Putin to consider further
expansion of his power
by force.
After a few days, Putin's
army withdraws from Georgia.
Losses are high.
An estimated 1500
deaths on either side.
Russians realize that they may
have won a quick victory in five days
but not because
their forces were
superior, but because they so
far outnumbered their enemy.
They use that as an excuse to carry out military
reforms that had been shelved for a long time.
They massively reduce the number of conscripts
and start professionalising the army.
The army is mainly career soldiers
who can carry out high tech op
A lot of money is invested in the
Navy, in the Air Force and in Special Ops.
After the Georgian War,
Russian military expenditure
increases from
$51 billion a year
to more than $80
billion in 2013 and 2014.
Just before the
attack on Ukraine
From 2008 to 2014, Russia's armed forces
became a central element of foreign policy,
with talk of "heavy metal diplomacy," -
coercive diplomacy using military means.
Russia invests in heavy metal.
A modern army for the
conflicts of the 21st century.
And from 2007, Russia
also practices cyber warfare.
When computer
networks in Estonia crash,
it's the first known foreign
deployment of Russia's cyber forces.
The enemy is the West, and it
must be fought at every level.
That's not just an issue for the Russian
military, but for the whole of Russian society.
Soviet warfare and other new
techniques that didn't play a role in the
Union's wars, or those
of the Czarist empire.
l. the Russian Orthodox Church,
led from 2009 by Patriarch Kiril
He is one of the chief influencers
for a revived Greater Russian empire.
Patriarch Kirill talks of the so-called
'Russian world', which makes
him more or less the chief
ideologue of Putin's regime.
The concept goes well beyond
Russia's current political borders.
Ukraine is part of it.
So is Belarus, and so are the regions
with a high proportion of Russian
speakers, in the Baltic states
around Kaliningrad and other places.
From 2013, Putin starts
to claim these countries
as part of Russia's
sphere of influence.
It's not about
this or that region.
I believe it's about Putin
putting down markers.
"I'm against the West. I have a different system
and I don't want to be bound up in your world.
I'm creating another world."
Even if its economy and the
size of its population don't justify it,
Putin's Russia wants to be a
superpower, on equal footing with the USA.
End of November 2013, demonstrations
on the Maidan, Kyiv's central Square.
Ukraine's political self-image has shifted.
Away from Moscow, towards the EU and NATO.
But Viktor Yushchenko has been replaced as
Ukrainian president by Viktor Yanukovych.
The puppet of the Kremlin rejects his
predecessor's cooperation agreement with the EU.
Yanukovych is pro-Moscow and
against the EU Association Agreement.
The people of Kyiv and the Ukraine
want to free themselves from Moscow.
They know their country is imperfect and
corrupt, but they want to go their own way.
As the weeks pass, the
protests on the Maidan grow.
Young people occupy the square
day and night, as if anticipating a decisive
battle for the future of their country.
ith CIA plot, a conspiracy by
Western states to surround Russia w
pro-Western regimes, whose final
aim is to force regime change in Russia.
Nothing less than the
whole of Russia is at stake.
Putin is in no doubt about that.
"We don't believe Ukraine belongs
to the West. Ukraine is Russian."
A clear red line is being overstepped. If you
don't understand that, there will be war."
The war begins on
February 18th 2014.
Snipers from Ukraine's special
forces start to pick
off demonstrators.
But some of the insurgents are
armed, too, and they fire back.
Putin was offering to
encourage to use force.
And that's why with some Russian help,
some snipers started to shoot at the crowd.
It's very likely that at that moment,
Russian security service specialists
were working as agents
provocateurs to stir up violence.
But it's also true that weapons
were used on the Ukrainian side.
More than 80 people die in
the massacre on the Maidan.
Yanukovych calls fresh
elections to defuse the conflict.
Days later, he decamps to
Russia and is relieved of office.
Immediately after the shooting on the Maidan,
the Russian army occupies Ukraine's Crimea.
Putin uses the power-vacuum left by
Ukraine's political U-turns to seize Crimea.
Crimea is geostrategically
significant, and it's important
for propaganda and
ideological reasons too:
Crimea is the pearl of the
empire and he gets it back.
Crimea has been Russian territory since
Catherine the Great's victory over the Ottomans.
But in 1954, after Stalin's death,
then Soviet General Secretary
Nikita Krushchev gifted Crimea
to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine.
Russian soldiers with no
insignia on their uniforms,
so-called green men, meet
almost no resistance in Crimea.
There was no fighting for Crimea
because even Ukrainians knew that Crimea is
Russian territory. I mean it was just
considered to be Ukrainian territory by mistake.
That doesn't alter the fact that in
international law it was an illegal annexation.
The Crimea is the territory of
the sovereign state of Ukraine.
In Ukraine's Donbas region,
pro-Russian separatists soon start
shooting at Ukrainian
soldiers and militiamen.
Russia provokes skirmishes to extend
the territory held by pro-Moscow fighters.
Russia occupies
Crimea in February 2014,
at the same time launching a
proxy war against Ukraine in the
regions of Luhansk and
Donetsk in the Donbas.
Prior to 2014, Ukrainians
did not have army at all.
The fighting which took
place later in spring and
summer of 2014 in Donbas,
was conducted mainly
by volunteers who actually,
you know, didn't
know how to fight.
Once again, international reaction to the
occupation of Crimea and the war in Donbas is muted.
The West again allows Putin to believe he can
pursue expansionist policies without risk.
Looking back, it should have been a
much more robust response to make
it clear this annexation
would carry a far higher price.
I would argue that
if those sanctions
would be on the level
which we see now,
the invasion of February 22nd
would never have happened.
Hague. came in President Barack
Obama's speech at a conference in The
Russia is a regional power
that is threatening some
of its immediate neighbors.
Not out of strength,
but out of weakness.
Putin's reply is a huge parade
bristling with military hardware.
At the night time rehearsal, all the weaponry
the army has to offer crosses Red Square -
including ballistic missiles.
Aleppo.
In September 2015, the Russian
air force intervenes in Syria's civil war.
Officially, the campaign is part of the international
struggle against Islamic fundamentalists.
US. up the Assad regime, against
armed opposition supported by the
The Russians use Syria first to bomb their way
back onto the international stage and then to gain
significance on the
international stage.
And of course they also used it to test
their weapons and to gain experience.
Putin and his generals follow
the campaign on a giant screen.
He allows Western
cameras in to watch.
The whole world must see how
powerful Putin's Russia has become.
It's very clear this is no
longer just about Syria.
It's about a confrontation
with a heavily armed NATO.
The basic idea is to demonstrate Russia's
ability to fight a 21st century war.
On the one hand, a hybrid war,
but also a great war against the West.
In Syria, the Russians deliberately
target the civilian population.
This is a war crime.
Exactly as in Chechnya,
20 years before.
The way in which these military
attacks, conflicts were were carried
out with utmost brutality, should
have been a sign to all of us,
apable going to sit around a
negotiating table with, because if he's c
of this sort of thing, he does not stand for
the sorts of values that we claim to stand for.
The provocations increase NATO AWACs monitor
more airspace infringements by Russian fighters.
Russia stations new missiles at
Kaliningrad directly on NATO's borders.
Russia's hypersonic 'Avantgard' missile is a
weapon for which there is supposedly no defense.
A great confrontation
seems inevitable.
Putin seeks divine support.
In June 2020, he consecrates a new
cathedral dedicated to Russia's military.
Near Moscow, there's a
cathedral for the Russian army
with an illustrated historical
record linking past wars, including
before 1917, with the tasks
awaiting the military of the future.
There are empty spaces for
commemorations of future battles.
The church glamorizes war and
glorifies crimes - like the bloody
purges under Stalin that claimed
the lives of millions of Russians.
Putin, his defense minister
and Patriarch Kirill
attend the consecration.
Construction costs more
than 75 million Euros.
A mural commemorating the repatriation of the
Crimea, paying homage to Putin and his coterie is
still incomplete at the
time of the consecration.
He wants to go down in history as a
figure like Peter the Great or like Stalin.
For him, his own ego and his own individual
importance in his mythical idea of the world,
world history, is more
important than reality.
I very much fear, a Hitler
in the bunker parallel,
that he's just not going
to be able to see a reality.
Russia wants its empire back.
That's been the goal of ex-KGB officer
Vladimir Putin for more than 20 years.
Kyiv, February 24th,
2022. Air raid sirens.
Russia is attacking Ukraine
in a full scale invasion.
People try to find
places of safety.
There's chaos on
the roads and streets.
Putin calls it a special military
operation for the liberation of Ukraine.
And he threatens the West.
This war is not about Ukraine.
It's his major battle
to to control the world.
It is Putin's third war, with severe
Russian losses from day one.
But in Russia's wars,
casualties have never counted.