Putin vs the West review – like a gripping, terrifying soap opera

The first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine looms. How did we get here? Well timed to answer that is Putin vs the West (BBC Two), a three-part documentary that will consider Russia’s involvement in the Syrian civil war, before analysing the run-up to the sorry events of early 2022. Before all that, episode one takes us back to 2014, when Russian forces crept into and occupied the southern Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, to international outrage. Here is a tale of tense negotiations and uncertain diplomatic manoeuvres.

We begin in late 2013 – when Vladimir Putin pressed the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, into pulling out of a trade deal with the EU – before revisiting the protests and politicking that brought down Yanukovych, as well as Putin’s military response to that slight. The roll call of contributors is impressive: prominent Russian and Ukrainian leaders appear alongside big beasts from the EU such as Jean-Claude Juncker and José Manuel Barroso. The impression we are given is that even at the highest international level – perhaps especially there – politics is an unpredictable, nebulous game of manners.

This is the latest series from Norma Percy, whose style is to retell big political stories in the words of the people who were in the room. The problem with this type of documentary, which has been made in the west and achieves its prestige by interviewing only the most august politicians and their closest aides, is that there is no one credible to interrogate the west’s narrative.

Was Russia right, for example, to be outraged when prominent European politicians stood alongside pro-EU protesters on the streets of Ukraine? Was that, as we see Putin saying at the time, a bit like if Russian leaders had turned up to support anti-EU protests in Greece? Probably not, but the fact that any counterarguments tend to come from the clearly painted villains of the piece does sometimes make it feel as if part of the picture is missing.

That said, in the absence of detailed debate, awkward observations still percolate. “In the Italian political class, there was a certain indulgence towards Putin,” says François Hollande, revealing that one of the faux pas committed by these crass apologists was to point out that London happily accommodated numerous dodgy Russian oligarchs. “Which was not wrong,” the former president of France concedes, as he explains how competing interests in the EU made it hard to draw up an effective sanctions regime in response to the Crimean incursion. Elsewhere, the programme highlights divisions within the US about whether to settle for sanctions or respond with force.

Reservations about the journalistic rigour of letting powerful people describe their own motivations evaporate in the face of what this format does unexpectedly well: absurd or trivial gossip. At one point, a crucial negotiation designed to avoid full-on war has to be conducted in a hurry, because the Queen is to attend a formal dinner that evening, which means no one can turn up late.

On another fraught evening, Angela Merkel underlines the severity of the situation by suggesting the gathered leaders forgo the gourmet meal they have planned, instead getting on with trying to stop Ukraine being set aflame. Hollande recalls that the statespeople had to make do with “sandwiches that were not the freshest”. As for the US, Barack Obama causes chaos with a mic-drop diss characterising Russia as a “regional power”, something a badly offended Putin brings up in several meetings with Europe’s most powerful people.

But what about the most serious and important country in any geopolitical scenario – Britain? Representing the UK is David Cameron, who was the prime minister for six years, but is redolent of that senior management bluffer most of us have worked beneath, the one we suspect knows nothing about what the company does and survives on a knack for guessing who can be squeezed for intel. Remembering a summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 2013, Cameron cheerfully admits asking the president of Azerbaijan – “who I always thought was quite a good reader of the situation” – what was going on.

Cameron was then “pretty clear” on the Ukraine problem. Archive footage shows us that, later, when the trouble escalated, he counselled that “we need to send a very clear message” to Putin; in the present day, he recalls: “I said, very clearly … ”

One of the programme’s best insights is that, even in the gravest circumstances, high-profile politicians are often reliant on empty hype. But their flaws create a gripping soap opera.