BBC series probes into Putin’s relations with West

BBC News has produced the latest episode of the documentary that delves into the West’s fraught relationship with Russia since the turn of the millennium.

The four-part series entitled Putin, Russia and the West, Vladimir Putin looks likely to be re-elected President of Russia in March after eight years as president, according to a press release by BBC’s Media Center.

The series is produced by acclaimed documentary maker Norma Percy and the Brook Lapping team that made the multi-award winning documentaries The Death of Yugoslavia, The Second Russian Revolution and Iran & the West. For the BBC is it executive produced by Fiona Campbell.

In Putin, Russia and the West, Putin’s top colleagues and Western statesmen tell the inside story of the past decade, from the grip that Russia has tried to keep on the former Soviet countries to the clamp down on human rights and the diplomatic efforts to cut nuclear arms.
Key interviews include Putin’s first Prime Minister, his Foreign, Defence and Economy ministers, as well as Presidents of Georgia, Ukraine and Poland. The West’s side of events is told by, amongst others, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Robert Gates, David Miliband and Gerhard Schroder.

"This is the 10^th big series that Brian Lapping and I have made for BBC Two. Our first charted the rise of Gorbachev and the fall of communism. Returning to Russia now 20 years later we found it was even harder to get inside Kremlin decision-making. Series director Paul Mitchell and I spent more than two years researching and filming in Moscow and Washington, Kiev, Warsaw, Berlin and Paris. It’s wonderful that the BBC can still put the necessary resources into a project of this scale."

The first film, Taking Control, starts with George W Bush meeting Putin in June 2001 and declaring how he ‘got a sense of his soul’ by looking him in the eye. It explores the effect of September 11th on the relationship between Russia and the West, and how Putin established control over the country’s leading business men, the oligarchs.

The second film, Democracy Threatens, includes an extraordinary interview with the retiring Ukrainian president admitting to being Putin’s ally in swinging the country’s 2004 election to Russia’s advantage and shows a newly discovered interview with the former Russian security officer Alexander Litvinenko, a fierce critic of Russia's government, who in 2006 died in a London hospital after apparently being poisoned.
The third film, War, explores how the tensions between Russia and Georgia escalated into an armed conflict. It also shows how Putin reacted to US plans to station an anti-ballistic missile system in Russia’s neighbours.

The final film, New Start, examines how Barack Obama, on his election in America, immediately launched a campaign to build a friendship with President Medvedev. It brings to life the tense renegotiations that took place to ensure the renewal of the Nuclear Treaty, START. It also looks at the complex double act of Putin and Dmitry Medvedev.