One would like to show these documentaries to the many Putin understanders and apologists who have suddenly become so quiet. Who babbled about the “flawless democrats” in the Kremlin and above all had the economy on their minds. On Tuesday evening, Arte will be broadcasting an entire themed evening on the war in Ukraine until late at night.
Above all, however, the question: Could one have known what kind of man the West would get involved with when he Wladimir Putin doing business? The answer, which this evening gives in an unusually clear tone, is unequivocally: yes. Above all, this makes “Putin’s Road to War” unmistakably clear. The American journalist Michael Kirk uses the most important biographical and political events from Putin’s life to try to understand the world of thoughts and the world view of the Russian president.
For Kirk, the decisive factor in understanding Putin is his past as an agent of the Soviet secret service, the KGB. From this time he has both a trauma and his basic idea of how politics and society work. Putin’s trauma was the fall of the Berlin Wall, experienced by the young agent in Dresden. At the time, he asked for instructions on how to deal with the demonstrators and the apparently imminent system change. “But Moscow isn’t reacting,” explains journalist and Russia expert Julia Ioffe in the film. “The influence of the Soviet Union is collapsing before his eyes and he radios home, but there is no answer from home.” Peter Baker from the New York Times adds: “Everything he knew from his childhood disappeared. That moment defined him and his life. From then on he was determined to restore what he believed had been lost.”
Bill Clinton is said to have warned Boris Yeltsin about the aspiring young Putin
From this also derives the second obsession that Putin, according to Kirk, has: There is always someone responsible. There is no such thing as the will of the people or social development. There is a mastermind behind everything that happens. And in Putin’s mind, it is primarily the United States that is working behind the scenes in developments to the detriment of the Soviet Union and Russia. So why not become the one pulling the strings yourself?
From the many experts he interviewed for his documentary, including dissident Masha Gessen and former CIA director John Brennan, Kirk learns that Putin is a pronounced narcissist who watches his own appearances on television time and time again. And just a few years later, Boris Yeltsin introduced this man as his successor. Bill Clinton is said to have warned Yeltsin about the up-and-coming young man after his first meeting with Putin. He doesn’t have democracy in his heart.
We know what followed: the brutal crackdown in Chechnya, the murders of opponents, the manipulation of the 2016 US elections by Russian hackers. Kirk draws the eerie portrait of an ice-cold, unscrupulous power man and dares to predict that Putin will go down in history as one of the great mass murderers of the 21st century.
The rest of the evening, which is also well worth seeing, with films about the murdered Russian politician Boris Nemtsov, Ukraine, Russia’s geostrategy in recent years and a completely new documentary about the German-Czechoslovak border, which was once part of the Iron Curtain, acts like footnotes afterwards this portrait.
Special topic: War in Ukraine, Arte, Tuesday, 8:15 p.m. and in the media library