Vladimir Putin is not exactly a compulsive liar. But he is so clever at crafting his own version of events that the impression he leaves is that of an almost impeccable statesman whose nose has never grown out of a lie. And see that this is true even for Ukraine.
The feeling is reflected in the nearly four hours of interviews that the Russian ruler recorded for just over two years. Next to him, the American producer and filmmaker Oliver Stone, with competence and a difficult non-partisanship, in a recipe he had tried in 2014 with the Venezuelan Hugo Chávez.
To rewatch Putin’s interviews is to take a tour of what’s left of his earlier statements on Ukrainian politics.
The war now underway was already formatted with practically the same actors. It was a conflict in the public square, with a few dozen dead, but already with a passionate way of loving or hating this powerful neighbor called Russia.
And with the two forces of gravity that were already pulling Ukraine in opposite directions. On the one hand, democracy and westernization, represented in an approximate and half-caricatural way by the European Union and by NATO, the military alliance guided by the United States. On the other, the Slavic soul that had survived in the Soviet Union, where Russia and Ukraine were one, with linguistic affinities and a strong cultural strand, which conservative nationalism then accused the West of trying to usurp.
But let’s see. Stone asks Putin to tell him all about Ukraine. He departs for a narrative of something that he himself had denounced among the Russians, in the months that preceded his ascension. Privatizations were quick and impoverished people. Misery began to go hand in hand with potential rebellions.
Russia then informed its smaller neighbors that it was negotiating membership of the World Trade Organization. In return, Ukraine said it was negotiating its membership of the European Union.
It would be a punch in the stomach, the way Putin put it. And the annoying thing — what he didn’t say — was that the Ukrainian turnaround came from Viktor Yanukovych, who in February 2014 brought Ukraine closer to civil war. He reportedly struck a deal with the Russians, left the capital, Kiev, and was deposed by the opposition.
The so-called Orange Revolution was victorious. But for Russia and Putin, what happened was a coup. Yanukovych has closed in with the Kremlin and left his supporters in the crosshairs of the nationalists. The former ruler fled to Crimea, a Ukrainian province that Russia would later annex. He then went into exile on Russian soil and would be in Belarus today, “at the disposal” of anyone who wants to invite him to govern.
In fact, the very annexation of Crimea, which cost Putin US economic sanctions, is described, in the interview with Oliver Stone, as an almost prosaic episode. The local population took over the peninsula’s public buildings and handed them over to Moscow’s representatives. That simple.
Vladimir Putin does his best to appear on camera as a simple man who enjoys sports (judo, equestrian and ice hockey) and who keeps his personal life from public curiosity. He was married only once, has two daughters and grandchildren who do not appear in the media.
It works. In three Kremlin offices, one tackier than the other, with an excess of telephone sets and videoconferencing screens. For one of them, he dispatched with road police about problems with a road in the Urals region.
He drove his own car in a single scene of the documentary. He is attentive and lazy. The kind of driver we don’t imagine could one day get drunk behind the wheel.
By the way, he appears only once with a small glass of vodka in his hands. But he tells his companions that the drink should be taken only later. Before that, everyone must complete a mission. It was in the second war in Chechnya, the separatist Islamic province whose male population — and the documentary does not touch on the subject — Putin practically decimated.
There are other areas of silence in Stone’s film, such as the suspicion that Putin ordered the poisoning of opponents who were excessively uncomfortable for him. Things that eventually happen.
