Putin has explicitly described Ukraine as what he calls historical Russian land.
It's very interesting that last summer at a time when Russian tanks and armoured
vehicles were already assembling on Ukraine's borders for what we now know was basically a
dress rehearsal for the invasion.
Putin did an extraordinary thing.
He became an amateur historian.
He sat down, he called up books, papers, essays and he wrote this 5,000 word
and essentially he sets out his key idea which is that Ukraine was never an independent country that is,
it has always being a part of Russia,
going all the way back to the 10th century.
Channeling these ideas of reuniting a divided kingdom, restoring spiritual unity and also teaching the west a lesson.
Ukraine's origins go back a very long way and Putin would say that Russia's origins
are the same and they go back the same distance in time.
If you can sort of skim a thousand years,
imagine a river, a sort of flowing river with a few kind of wooden sort of encampments, a citadel,
vikings paddling down from the north and what you have is you have a city-state called Kyivan Rus'
and most importantly, you have someone called Volodymyr the Great, or Vladimir, prince Vladimir and what
is important about prince Vladimir is that in 988, not recently, a long time ago, supposedly said, the
legend goes, he looked at various religions, he looked at Islam, didn't fancy Islam, and he decided
on orthodoxy and he got baptised and founded, as Putin would see it, Russian civilisation.
This was a single united kingdom and Putin essentially is arguing that we should go back to that,
we should go back to this unity.
You talk to Ukrainians and they say, hang on a minute, by the 11th century
the 12th century, we have since St Sophia's which is this kind of wonderful cathedral which is still
standing in the center of Kyiv and Moscow, what was Moscow about that, well Moscow was forest.
But for Putin, this proves in his mind that there's a unity between these countries
and that Ukraine is never really a thing, it's always been historical Russia, spiritual Russia,
something he strongly believes and something which is driving the war today.
I've been covering Ukraine for about 15 years,
I first started going there in 2007 as Moscow correspondent for the Guardian.
One of the elections I covered in 2010 was between Yulia Tymoshenko.
Good speaker, charismatic more kind of pro-European than her opponent who was Viktor Yanukovich who
is essentially a kind of thug.
His nickname was "dub" which means kind of you know block of wood, oak tree.
He won this election in 2010.
I'd met his people who said that he's
a democrat, he's reformed having tried to steal election in 2004
and of course it was all a pack of nonsense.
The first thing he does is try and lock up Tymoshenko,
he bribes MPs and he starts stealing billions and billions and billions of dollars.
The inflection point in this drama is in the autumn of 2013 where Ukraine is due to sign
an association agreement with the European Union, essentially putting it on a westward trajectory.
Putin doesn't want this to happen so he bribes Yanukovich,
scraps the association agreement and decides he's going to get a kind of bailout from Russia instead.
And there are street protests even though it's really cold.
People come out on the Maidan and for some weeks they're peaceful.
And then the Yanukovich's people start beating up demonstrators, some of them turn up dead.
It gets more and more violent and you get a sort of medieval style
siege where protesters are catapulting rocks at the riot police, and the riot police are firing back.
And this culminates when Yanukovich (...) shoot dead over 100 protesters.
It's a terrible moment, fire in the air, smoke, Yanukovich flees to Russia,
the Maidan uprising is successful but Vladimir Putin decides that this is a
CIA coup and he responds by annexing Crimea, sending in his special services to seize the
peninsula and kicking off a kind of counter uprising, a pro-Russian uprising, in the east
of the country and creates a problem which has really kind of haunted Ukraine ever since.
When Russia and Vladimir Putin started sending troops to Ukraine's borders for the first time
in the spring of 2021, it wasn't really immediately understood what was going on.
Russian drivers would be going along, you know, listening to pop music and they have their dash cams on and suddenly,
they would pass up a column of tanks.
It just seemed to me wishful thinking that Putin would deploy all this hardware and not do something.
Now actually what he did in Crimea in 2014 was already unthinkable,
I mean, he essentially seized an area of territory the size of Belgium.
It's like the French walking into Belgium and saying that's now France.
If you can do Crimea then why not do
more?
The messaging coming from the White House is very, very worrying.
Essentially they're saying that Putin is planning to attack Ukraine, that he is looking at a large and ambitious military operation,
and that things could get very, very bad.
Our view is this is an extremely dangerous situation,
we're now at a stage where Russia could at any point launch an attack in Ukraine.
On February the 21st 2022, Putin held, I would say, the most extraordinary meeting
probably of his presidency, where he summoned his security council.
Putin is in one corner on a little chair and
a bit like naughty school kids, his security council members are on the other side and,
you know, Putin has a plan which is to to formally recognise as independent Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics,
these are sort of puppet-Russian entities in the east of Ukraine.
What that means is, one that the negotiating process with Kyiv is over but two essentially it means war.
It's a feudal exercise in fealty and oath sharing where these quite important powerful individuals
have to get up and say they agree with the plan and surprise, surprise they all agree.
Sergey Naryshkin, the head of Russian foreign intelligence, the SVR,
he gets his lines wrong and Putin sort of slaps him down.
The whole elite basically say that they will follow Putin's course and what turns out to be
what he calls a special operation in Ukraine – for special operation read full-blown war.
'The Russian president Vladimir Putin has launched a major military operation against Ukraine.'
'As Russian troops continue to invade Ukrainian defense forces are putting up a fight slowing Russia's advancements.'
It's clear this military campaign has not gone the way that Putin thought
it would go.
Putin is convinced that Ukraine is a place run by Nazis but the ordinary Ukrainians,
they were just yearning to be liberated by Russian troops and that when Russian soldiers came in,
they would greet them in traditional Ukrainian fashion with flowers or with bread and salt.
And instead, they were greeted by mortars, they were greeted by babushka, by old ladies unarmed, saying:
fuck off!
There has been the most furious, cohesive resistance from a whole country, fighting for its survival
against Russian occupation and what I would argue is essentially Russian fascism.
Vladimir Putin has always been suspicious, he's always been paranoid, he's always been prone to
conspiratorial thinking, I mean, that goes with KGB, I mean, it's a priori, it's how he sees the world
and the question is, you know, has he gone mad or is he acting rationally
within his own warped parameters within his own fictitious reality?
And the thing I see is not just narcissism which has always been there with Putin but
a growing sense of messianic purpose that he's been sent by God, by history.
And unfortunately for now, I think Putin enjoys
the popular support for what he's doing, even though the version being told to Russians is a lie.
I think this is the beginning of the end of Putin, I think this is the last act.
If this is a Shakespearean drama, we're in act five.
Scene one or scene two, act five.
I think there are three more scenes to go.