Insider Accounts in Putin vs the West

The new three-part documentary Putin vs the West, from Brook Lapping, debuted earlier this week on BBC Two, with all episodes available on the iPlayer.

“Brook Lapping has been making series that try to show what it’s like inside the room when the really big political decisions are taken for more years than I’d like to remember,” says Norma Percy, executive producer for Brook Lapping. “The BBC called us in soon after we delivered the last one—in this case, the BAFTA-shortlisted Trump Takes on the World—to ask us what we wanted to do next. We spent a couple of weeks scrabbling around for ideas, but in the end, we needn’t have worried. As soon as we got there, the BBC tore up the list we had put together and suggested we look at Putin.”

Brook Lapping had put a spotlight on Russia in productions twice before: first in 1991 with The Second Russian Revolution, an eight-part series that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union through interviews with Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and their politburos. Its last series about Russia, broadcast ten years ago, looked at Vladimir Putin and his first decade in power.

“But in early 2021, Russia seemed an eccentric choice,” Percy recalls. “Yes, Putin had taken Crimea in 2014, interfered with U.S. elections in 2016 and poisoned citizens on British soil, but at that moment, relations with Russia were not exactly dominating headlines.”

On top of that, she adds, it seemed rather difficult to execute. “For Putin, Russia and the West, we had spent weeks in the Kremlin with Putin’s men getting them to tell the story, but Russia had become far more dangerous over the years—most of the journalists and fixers we had once worked with were no longer even in the country,” she says. “Jo Carr (head of BBC current affairs), however, was not put off: ‘What you should do is deal with Putin. If you go back to the Western leaders you’ve interviewed across your past series—like Inside Europe: Ten Years of Turmoil or Inside Obama’s White House—I think you’ll find Russia was one of the main problems they wrestled with over the last decade. And there was rarely ever agreement over the central question: Do we try and make friends or slap on sanctions?’

“When can an independent producer afford not to listen to a BBC suggestion?” Percy continues. “We began developing the story. Then, we all know what happened six months later, on February 24, 2022.”

With such a broad scope to examine on this topic, Brook Lapping had the difficult task of deciding what specifically to home in on. “For us, access is key,” Percy says. “When Putin invaded Ukraine halfway through our research, he not only made our work more relevant but also much harder to do. Now, we were asking people to tell us what went on behind closed doors not just for history but while they were dealing with an ongoing war in Europe.”

She says, though, that the approach of who to include is simple. “We get only the people who were there to tell us what happened (no journalists or pundits). Really—no analysis, no finger-pointing, just: What did you say to Putin?” In this case, it is tales from presidents, prime ministers and top officials themselves that form the story told.

Former U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, for example, tells a story about why he decided to make bringing Putin closer to the West a major aim of his foreign policy. The head of the CIA, Bill Burns, recounts his trip to Moscow in the midst of the Russian troop build-up along the border with Ukraine. Boris Johnson, also a former U.K. prime minister, explains how, as the war clouds darkened, he got the Russian president “on the blower” to try and talk him down. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, shares details of a frank conversation with his wife as the Russian bombs began to fall.

“We deal with only what happened and how it happened,” Percy says. “But I hope having watched it, [viewers will] understand why it happened as well.”

Brook Lapping’s Putin vs the West for BBC Two is a co-production with Les Films d’Ici and ARTE France. The series is being distributed internationally by BBC Studios.