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00:01St. Petersburg, 1994.
00:05Our cameras have joined the future king, Charles, on a visit.
00:11On his tour of the city, he is flanked by dozens of local officials.
00:17One of them is the lesser-known St. Petersburg deputy mayor.
00:26A quiet man with an unusual background.
00:31This is the first time that UK television cameras ever came across Vladimir Putin.
00:40Charles does not know it, but he is standing next to one of the most consequential figures in Russia's long history.
00:49A man who will go on to transform the course of the 21st century.
00:54Vladimir Putin!
01:00Who will bring war back to Europe.
01:04And with it, the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.
01:09But where did he come from?
01:11What turned this unassuming outsider into the man we see today?
01:14And what, in his heart of hearts, does he really want?
01:24Putin's story begins in the same city, then called Leningrad, in the 1950s.
01:28It had been devastated by a brutal Nazi siege a few years earlier.
01:34In the face of ghastly privations, the people of this city held on right in the front line, continually subjected to shelling and bombing.
01:41His father went off to fight while his mother battled starvation at home.
01:47Both are thought to have suffered from lasting trauma for years after.
01:50He grew up with this great understanding that Russia suffered, the Soviet Union suffered.
01:57Unlike in Moscow, where I'm from, people in St. Petersburg are much more prone not to leave any food on their plates.
02:04And they keep, even those who were born much later than Putin, they would say, well, you know, during the blockade, it was, you know, people had no food whatsoever.
02:18And so we cannot really do this.
02:19The details of Putin's upbringing paint a picture of a rough childhood in a hostile neighbourhood.
02:28One particular story has endured of the day a young Putin was chasing a rat around his apartment stairwell.
02:35To this day, historians have drawn parallels between the cornered rat and the young Putin himself, a small boy who was frequently targeted by bigger kids.
03:03He grew up in a tough environment in which he had to defend himself.
03:08And that made him aware of the fact that if he doesn't hit first, if he doesn't show strength, he would be hit more.
03:17And I think that certainly influenced his character today.
03:20He's very competitive.
03:21He's very vindictive.
03:22And he was looking for a means of, if you like, turning over the bigger and more advantaged kids.
03:33As a teenager, Putin became captivated by romantic portrayals of the now notorious Soviet secret service, the KGB.
03:43His biggest inspiration was this film, The Shield and the Sword, the story of a Soviet spy embedded in Nazi Germany.
03:52I watched it only when I became interested in Putin and I kind of see why he would be associating himself with this tall, skinny man who quietly, cleverly fights against foreign enemies, foreign and domestic.
04:05But when Putin did join the KGB, the reality was very different to the propaganda films he used to watch.
04:12There were the elite KGB who were trained to be spies, to go abroad, who were very sophisticated.
04:18That's not the bit that Putin was in.
04:21Putin as a young KGB officer was patrolling the streets of Leningrad, trying to keep an eye on dissidents and also keep an eye on foreigners.
04:33A fairly low grade occupation in a bit of the KGB that was really very thuggish.
04:39In the 1980s, Putin was posted into the East German city of Dresden, working as a liaison to their own secret police, the Stasi.
04:51It's not quite clear exactly what he was doing in Dresden, not doing anything particularly sexy or interesting, but leading a comfortable, privileged life.
05:00And then suddenly, the world collapses around him.
05:05Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
05:10East Germany announces it's opening its orders.
05:15Its people can walk through the wall that's imprisoned them since 1961.
05:19Just before 10 o'clock, the moment Berliners have waited 28 years for.
05:26The fall of the Berlin Wall.
05:29The first step towards the reunification of Germany and the end of Soviet occupation.
05:35Vladimir Putin was watching in real time the disintegration of the Berlin Wall.
05:42He was seeing for the old guard, for the kind of conservative Russians, the humiliation as their empire began to fall apart.
05:51There was nothing worse for Putin and others in the KGB than to see the influence of the USSR dwindle and it becoming really something of a laughing stock.
06:07Soon after, in Dresden, demonstrators took to the streets in their hundreds.
06:13From the KGB building there, Putin called Moscow, urging them to send military backup.
06:22He was met with three words that would come to haunt him.
06:26Moscow is silent.
06:30The Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, would not come to his aid.
06:35I spoke to Gorbachev myself about this.
06:37Gorbachev said, well, I didn't want to dictate the fates of people who didn't want to be with us.
06:42But Putin came out of that idea that you do need to control people who don't want to be with you because that's your strength.
06:51In 1991, the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time as the USSR finally collapsed amidst economic malaise and popular unrest.
07:04The Soviet empire founded by Lenin, held together by Stalin and now effectively destroyed by President Gorbachev's reforms is tonight being buried in haste and without ceremony.
07:17What was heralded in the West as a new beginning was an ending for Putin.
07:21When it collapsed, it affected him massively. I mean, this is a guy, you know, who believed in the Soviet Union.
07:28I don't think he probably was a Marxist or believed in communism, but he believed in the Soviet Union as a great power.
07:34And suddenly it just crumbles. And I think this was, as he said himself, a catastrophic moment in his life.
07:43He was forced to return to his home city of St. Petersburg without a job and nobody in a city with nothing.
07:51I remember going to St. Petersburg in 1991, 92 and seeing extreme poverty.
08:00Here in St. Petersburg, they're preparing what could be the toughest winter since the Nazi blockade of the city.
08:06People queuing up for food, quite educated people doing things like selling dolls to foreigners on the street as their only means of gaining income.
08:16So that was traumatic for Putin, as it was for a lot of people in Russia who had assumed that their privileged, protected life would go on indefinitely.
08:28But amidst the despair and deprivation, Vladimir Putin saw opportunity.
08:33He ventured away from the world of national security and into politics, taken first under the wing of the mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak.
08:43And he began to make the connections, which I think only those in that sort of national security space could do so.
08:49And he began to recognize that, in fact, if he played his cards right, he could have real influence.
08:55And I think it was in those years, in those early St. Petersburg years, that he recognized that if everything fell into place,
09:02if he could build up the network with the national security apparatchiks and with the oligarchs,
09:08then perhaps it wasn't too ambitious to see himself actually in the Kremlin itself.
09:14In 1996, he took another step towards the Kremlin, relocating to Moscow and gaining favour with the president, Boris Yeltsin.
09:22I met him very briefly in 1999 and he shook my hand. And I remember that hand till this day was a very firm, small hand.
09:31And it was just, you know, kind of, I remember that moment. I thought that's the president, that's the next president.
09:37There were other much more important political figures at the time, just something about him that seemed very, not convincing, but very forceful.
09:50For the wider world, though, the news in 1999 that Putin was appointed prime minister and named as Yeltsin's successor as president came as a surprise.
10:00The man that Boris Yeltsin has now chosen to lead his battered government is virtually unknown to the public.
10:05As parliamentarians muttered, several politicians said it was just lunacy.
10:10He was this nondescript personality and he was very, very obviously insecure.
10:15And the entire political class in Moscow was saying, who on earth is this guy?
10:20And he'd been put there by Yeltsin because he was competent, young, sober, but he had no charisma.
10:27He'd never made a political speech in his life.
10:30It was only months later that Yeltsin resigned.
10:35And upstepped Vladimir Putin as president of Russia.
10:42There was a view in Moscow at the beginning of his presidency, 25 years ago, that this was a rather weak leader who was going to be transitional.
10:54And then some stronger figure would emerge to really be the next proper president of Russia a few years down the road.
11:03Well, it turned out otherwise.
11:12These are Vladimir Putin's opening steps on the international stage.
11:16His visit to the UK that same year was one of the first chances the Western world had to size him up.
11:22It was a red carpet moment. Gordon Ramsay, no less, was drafted in to cook for him.
11:29I felt from the outset, I mean, he's very cold personality.
11:46He could put on a bit of forced humor, but there was no sense of warmth from him.
11:50He felt suspicious. You could detect a certain paranoia.
11:57There was one thing he did not want to talk about, which large crowds had gathered outside the gates of Downing Street to protest.
12:05Russia's criminal!
12:07The first was allegations of human rights abuses in Russia's brutal war with the breakaway Republic of Chechnya.
12:14The moment anybody mentioned Chechnya to Putin, he would get extremely angry and he would go into a sort of 20-minute rant on the subject.
12:25I saw him do it with Tony Blair.
12:29I did ask him a question when he visited London. And that question became, in a strange way, kind of the slipping of the mask.
12:36Because I was interested in human rights and how Vladimir Putin would respond to that.
12:41How are you going to show that those fears are misplaced and assure people that the hard-won freedoms in Russia are now secure?
12:49And what I was faced was kind of an angry rebuke and tirade.
12:54And I want to underline yet again that the actions of Russia are not against Mosulists, against Chechens.
13:00They are directed entirely against international extremism and terrorism.
13:06That question did kind of show who Putin was.
13:09You know, he was posing and pretending to be this kind of man who could be sympathetic to kind of Western interests.
13:18He wanted to be kind of a little bit of a Gorbachev.
13:22But in reality, he was always that hard-nosed, gritty KGB professional, angry about humiliation, concerned not about human rights but about Russian pride.
13:34His own staff in the Kremlin would say, well, I'd say, you know, things are not going well in Chechnya and are you sure you've got it right?
13:42And they'd say, well, we're not sure we've got it right. But we can't discuss the subject with Putin because the moment you mention it, they say he just gets angry.
13:52Putin's sense of pride was rocked by two other major humiliations in his early years, watched on news channels around the globe.
14:01First, the accidental sinking of a Russian nuclear submarine, the Kursk, with more than 100 personnel on board.
14:10The nuclear-powered Kursk is the pride of Russia's northern fleet and an extraordinary human drama and rescue effort is now being played out nearly 500 feet below the surface.
14:20It was a moment that tested Vladimir Putin in a way that he'd never been challenged before.
14:25He had to act not as a sort of KGB officer but as the leader of a nation.
14:30He had to deal with things he'd never had any experience of, like public relations, like dealing with an angry public.
14:37In the days after the Kursk submarine sank, there was a sort of furious reaction from the families of the trapped sailors.
14:46They wanted to know, well, where was Vladimir Putin? Why couldn't their loved ones be rescued when the Kursk was simply 100 metres underneath the ocean of the Barents Sea?
14:57Last night, he had a six-hour-long meeting with the relatives of the lost crew.
15:01Russian TV, given sole access, did not broadcast any of the exchanges between the anguished families and their leader.
15:07This is the moment when an anguished mother turned her rage on the bemused Deputy Prime Minister of Russia.
15:13Then, in a chilling incident, more reminiscent of the old Soviet Union, a woman doctor appears behind her, clearly holding a syringe.
15:22When the distraught mother continued to harangue the Deputy Prime Minister, several senior Navy officers tried to restrain or console her,
15:29while the doctor seems to administer a sedative.
15:32Vladimir Putin failed spectacularly to meet the moment.
15:37And I think it tells us something, that he was unable to interact with the families of the loved ones, of those sailors.
15:45He didn't even, in the first instance, even break away from his vacation.
15:50Above all else, it tells us something really kind of quite chilling about Vladimir Putin,
15:56because in his conduct with Western naval rescue forces who were trying to save those trapped sailors...
16:03The once mighty Russian Navy is adamant it does not need the assistance of Britain or the United States.
16:09It is clear from the outset that he prized pride, the pride of the Russian northern fleet,
16:16and he prized the secrets of the Kursk, far higher than he prized the lives of his sailors.
16:24And I think from that we really begin to learn about who Vladimir Putin was and how he viewed leadership.
16:30He saw the Kursk as basically a symbol of Russian naval pride.
16:36He didn't see it in terms of 118 sailors who would die because he refused to help Western rescue forces reach the scene and reach the hatch.
16:46So it is a remarkable kind of moment for Vladimir Putin, but also a metaphor for how Putin's presidency became one of a sort of national security apparatchik, if you like,
16:58rather than somebody who could portray himself as father of the nation.
17:02And it became clear that he could never really outlive his KGB past.
17:11In 2004, another humiliation. Huge political upheaval in Ukraine.
17:20Protests came to a head over allegations that the presidential election was rigged in favour of Putin's ally, Viktor Yanukovych.
17:27Viktor Yanukovych, in what became known as the Orange Revolution.
17:32He was indeed hugely humiliated by the Orange Revolution.
17:37He had backed the loser there, and his erstwhile friends in the West obviously were on the side of the Orangers.
17:46Putin was furious over that. He wouldn't take phone calls.
17:49His staff told me that he was so angry that when he came in in the morning they'd hide under their desks.
17:56He never forgets a slight.
17:59Whenever he feels he's been defeated, and this is the old judo player in him, he has to get up and try to knock the other guy over.
18:06And Putin did not forget.
18:10In 2014, his ally Viktor Yanukovych was ousted for a second time in the wake of deadly clashes between demonstrators and police.
18:19And then he struck.
18:22For the first time since borders were redrawn in 1945, one European country is annexing territory belonging to another.
18:33Flanked by his generals, the Russian president consolidated his troops in Crimea.
18:38Whatever the consequences for the international order, whatever the cost in sanctions, Russia's elite gathered to give President Putin a triumph worthy of a returning Roman general.
18:50Crimea has always been and remains, he said, an inseparable part of Russia.
18:56He waged war on Ukraine from 2014, but by the end of 2021, he still had not achieved his objective of bringing the Ukrainians to heel.
19:07So it was at that point that he decided to go further and go for a full scale invasion.
19:12It was a day of infamy for the Russian government and terror for millions of Ukrainians.
19:28Vladimir Putin wrote himself into the history books in all the wrong ways as he invaded a democratic sovereign neighbor in a war of imperial conquest with chilling echoes of the 1930s.
19:47Putin will stand condemned in the eyes of the world and of history.
19:51He will never be able to cleanse the blood of Ukraine from his hands.
19:58Now we see him for what he is.
20:03I think it's important to see Ukraine and the unprovoked Russian aggression against Ukraine through the prism of of not just decades, but centuries of Russian insecurities.
20:14In the Putin world view, Ukraine is quintessentially Russian.
20:19It's the origins of the word Rus.
20:21It's where the Russian story began as seen from the Kremlin.
20:27If you want to understand why Vladimir Putin is prepared to expend perhaps a million Russians in terms of the number who have died or been wounded in this current invasion.
20:38I think it's important to understand that Putin sees it as a national security threat, but it's almost spiritual for him.
20:47It's almost existential.
20:48He sees Ukraine as fundamental to Russian security and even and this is the point fundamental to Russian identity.
20:56I think for all Russians, one would say Ukraine seemed just kind of a part that is always there.
21:08The whole of the generation of which he was part could not come to terms with the fact that the Soviet Union was no longer a great power, a superpower.
21:17And people at the time were saying, you know, Ukraine, it's like cutting off an arm and you continue to feel the fingers.
21:26It's kind of growing pains.
21:27It's the falling off colonial territories pain and the center is trying to deal with this in certain ways.
21:36A short while into his invasion in 2022, it seemed that Putin had badly miscalculated.
21:44Humiliation was the word so often used to describe it.
21:48But over the next three years, he did something that he knew all too well.
21:53He waited.
21:55I think he's a great tactician.
21:57He's a judo master and he's a serious judo master, so he knows how to play his opponents.
22:02And it's not about so often in the West.
22:06What does Putin want?
22:07How does he want to win?
22:08What is the strategy?
22:09In judo, you don't have that.
22:11In judo, you're waiting for opening in the opponent's kind of body.
22:18And then you go for that opening and then you see what happens after that.
22:23Tactically, for Putin, for the time that he's in office, it has worked well.
22:27I mean, look at him 25 years, three years and three years of invasion and in Ukraine was not doing really well.
22:37And yet he basically good at waiting.
22:40And so he waited for openings of his opponents and ultimately ended up in rather favorable position in this war.
22:48On the domestic front, Putin has for years been virtually untouchable.
22:57As a result of the most brutal regime of oppression Europe has seen this century.
23:05Freedom of expression has long been lost.
23:08And information channels tightly controlled.
23:15Time and again, Putin's most prominent critics have been killed in violent and often unexplained circumstances.
23:22From the Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned in London in 2006.
23:27The attempted assassination of the Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018.
23:36To the man he feared the most, the opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
23:40Last year, in a notorious Arctic prison, four years after Putin first tried to kill him.
23:46Putin's use of violence, fear and intimidation as a means of control carries strong echoes of his former employer, the Soviet secret service.
24:12You tend not to leave the KGB.
24:15The sort of paranoia, particularly the internal thuggish branch of the KGB, the domestic security, counter intelligence branch.
24:25These were people who were highly paranoid.
24:28And one can see that Putin is extremely paranoid.
24:30He's become more paranoid over the years, much more paranoid since the period when I used to see him.
24:35After another sham presidential election last year, Putin is into his fifth term in office, his command over Russian people as strong as ever.
24:47But on the world stage, a new challenge faces him, the giant figure of Donald Trump.
24:52I am very disappointed with President Putin. I thought he was somebody that meant what he said and he'll talk so beautifully and then he'll bomb people at night. We don't like that.
25:05What Putin really thinks of the US president and how he deals with him could be the defining question of the next four years and could be existential for Ukraine.
25:18Trump is much bigger than Putin. I think that will make Putin uncomfortable. But I think Putin can see weaknesses in Trump that he can play on in a very cunning way.
25:31Does Putin genuinely see Trump as a buddy? No, I think he sees him as, if you like, a useful idiot, to use Lenin's phrase, somebody that he can manipulate, flatter, play up to.
25:44So I think he's very good at playing Trump.
25:47He just knows exactly when to flatter him, what to press, what to not press and so on and so forth.
25:53And we saw it in 2018 with our own eyes in Helsinki when they met.
25:59It was remarkable because Trump was just, it was like one of those fairytale stories that Putin is playing the pipe and Trump is just following.
26:09Emmanuel Macron positions himself as somebody who can read Trump.
26:13I think it's a child play comparing to what Putin can do.
26:23A quarter century in the Kremlin has changed Putin.
26:26But as he himself said in this interview back in 2015, he has always been shaped by and perhaps defined by his extraordinary past.
26:37Somebody in Russia told me there is no such thing as a former KGB man.
26:44Once a KGB man, always a KGB man.
26:47You know, not a single stage of our lives passes without a trace.
26:58No matter what we're involved in, no matter what we do.
27:02All this knowledge we acquire, all the experience, will always remain with us.
27:07And we carry it further and will use it somehow.
27:10Well, in this sense, yes, they're right.
27:12Yes, they're right.
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