Putin vs the West TV review — world leaders face up to failures to stop Russian aggression

Ken Burns’s documentary The US and the Holocaust recently outlined how Hitler was afforded the space to take his expansionist goals and warped ideology to a devastating extreme. Now a new BBC series, Putin vs the West, finds history repeating itself.

The three-part series follows the decade-long path to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and explores whether it might have been diverted by western powers. Produced by the veteran documentarian Norma Percy, the show may be seen as a return to her 2012 series Putin, Russia and the West — which provoked the criticism of several influential Russian dissidents, who thought it overlooked uncomfortable truths about the president. Percy denied such accusations, but this new programme tells the story of how the west underestimated Putin’s desire and capacity to “rock the foundations of European security”.

The film-maker assembles an inexhaustible line-up of world leaders and diplomats — including Volodymyr Zelenskyy, David Cameron and François Hollande (to name but a few) — to provide the range of perspectives and expertise that such a subject demands. While there’s some concise narration along the way, the main draw of the series is that the commentary and analysis are left almost entirely to those who were in (or adjacent to) high office at critical moments in the slide to war: such as Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its deadly interventions in Syria in 2015-16.

These two portents of the conflict to come, and Europe’s hesitant, divided response to them, are the focus of the first couple of episodes. Many of those revisiting how things played out seem haunted by regrets that they could have done more to curb Putin’s dangerous ambitions at that time. But culpability is also occasionally directed at others as the series considers the tensions within the west itself. The former Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaitė accuses the major European nations of letting the “comfort [of] cheap energy” inform their decision to keep sanctions to a minimum after the Crimean invasion.

Wearing as it can be to listen to politicians talk of misjudgments and missed opportunities, their testimonies of dealing with Putin — or talking to him “on the blower”, as Boris Johnson notes with his usual commensurate gravity — does open a unique window into diplomacy at its most fraught and frustrating.

These insightful recollections of tense meetings and peacekeeping negotiations give a real sense of the thorny paradox of engaging with a man who exploits compromise and becomes firmer in his convictions when challenged. This might sound like the show is giving western leaders an opportunity to excuse their shortcomings, but really this documentary is sufficiently nuanced to recognise that high-stakes diplomacy can at times feel like an impossibility.

Then again, shots of bombs over Kyiv at the series’ end remind us the alternative is worse.

★★★★☆

On BBC2 on January 30 at 9pm. New episodes air weekly

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