When disaster looms, western world leaders talk. They hold meetings, convene summits, debate with each other via their UN ambassadors and have conversations with their most senior advisers behind closed doors. Then they face the media to tell us what is happening, but the process does not end there. These days, especially if the crisis involves Russia, these leaders, diplomats and advisers – and their Russian opposite numbers – sit down two or three years later with the documentarian Norma Percy to tell us what really happened.
This is the conceit of Percy’s addictive recent-history series Putin Vs the West, which previously covered the fraught eight years leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In a two-part update that adds the dark postscript “At War” to the title, the unthinkable has happened. Yet, despite the calamitous subject matter, Percy maintains her knack for showing that diplomacy is a chaotic game of bluff and theatrics that is often downright funny.
We open at an international security conference in Munich, which took place days before war broke out. Ukraine, suspecting what is coming, begs the west to give it or, failing that, sell it military hardware with which to defend itself, but the initial pledges are underwhelming. “At first, the Germans offered us 5,000 helmets,” deadpans Oleksiy Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s national security council. “We were, of course, very grateful.”
Then, at a tense meeting of the UN security council, called with the aim of persuading Russia not to invade, there is a moment that one might think was the stuff of an Armando Iannucci satire, not the real world: everyone in the room suddenly looks at their buzzing phones, which are breaking the news that Russia has invaded.
From there, the story is one of the delicate discussions around when and how to send Ukraine arms, affected by a general desire not to start a third world war; when and how to apply economic sanctions, the difficulty there being the vulnerabilities of individual countries, such as Germany’s reliance on Russian gas or the UK’s hosting of Russian oligarchs; and the strategic manoeuvring of Nato.
In a series that divines politicians’ motives by trusting those politicians to tell us what they were, the last of those isn’t subjected to much scrutiny, but the complex sweep of international relations is skilfully marshalled into a gripping narrative. As usual, Percy’s list of interviewees, led by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, is deeply impressive. Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin are the only big names not crossed off.
The programme’s access to every country’s most august politicians occasionally causes British viewers to be shaken out of the moment. Here is a reminder that, in these most grave times, we have been led by a government full of politicians who are, in the words of Succession’s Logan Roy, “not serious people”. As the situation in Ukraine developed, we are told, the British prime minister went into urgent talks with his foreign policy strategists. Gosh, right, yes, the prime minister! Except … it’s Boris Johnson, who opens his contributions here by chuntering jovially about how he reacted to news of the incursion by uttering “some Anglo-Saxon expletives about Putin”.
There is a further sudden devaluing of the enterprise when Britain’s foreign secretary of February 2022 pops up. It turns out that the holder of this great office of state was – a point if you get it – Liz Truss. Her pronouncements about how she refused to indulge ludicrous Russian propaganda about the people of the Donbas having requested assistance are undermined by her vacuous demeanour.
A meeting at 10 Downing Street, in which she explained her position to the Russian ambassador, Andrey Kelin, is hilarious, at least in Percy’s retelling, which cuts between Truss and Kelin’s accounts of it. Truss says she was so morally outraged by Kelin’s cant that she told him: “Get out of my office!” Kelin insists Truss stormed out of her own office, leaving him in there. Whether she did this successfully or ended up in a stationery cupboard isn’t documented.
That this is one of many comical he-said-she‑said moments punctuating a fundamentally sober programme reinforces the point of Percy’s film-making: humanity’s most important collective decisions are made by individuals who are flawed at best, ridiculous at times and malignly self-interested more often than not. We might as well try to laugh about it.
• Putin Vs the West: At War was on BBC Two and is available on BBC iPlayer
