History of Vladimir Putin

On 9 August 1999, Russia's President, Boris Yeltsin, announced a new acting prime minister. Most Russians had never heard of him, and in a poll, just 2% said that they'd vote for him to become president. Exactly one month after Yeltsin's announcement, a massive explosion in an apartment building just half an hour's drive from the Kremlin killed more than 100 people. Less than four days after that, another apartment bombing less than four miles away killed 119 people. The morning after the second bombing, the speaker of the Russian Parliament paid tribute to the victims that had died in the city of Volgodhansk. But he'd made a mistake. Volgodonsk is 700 miles away from Moscow, where the bombing had actually happened. So when a car bomb actually exploded in Volgodansk three days later, things got even weirder. But there was no time for questions. Russia was under attack. The new Prime Minister quickly ordered a massive bombing campaign against separatists in the war torn region of Chechnya, even declaring that we'll waste them in the outhouse. Six months later, the new Prime Minister was elected president by a grateful Russian nation. His name was Vladimir Putin. And since he took power, he has not let go. He has had his enemies killed, started wars, and destabilized the global order. But for someone so dangerous and so important, we know surprisingly little about him. Who is Vladimir Putin, really? Why did he invade Ukraine? What's the real story behind those apartment bombings? And why is he actually weaker than ever? The Moscow apartment bombings are a key part of Vladimir Putin's rise to power. And don't worry, I'm going to talk more about them. But to truly understand how he became the man he is today, you need to understand the organization that molded him. The kgb. The KGB was one of the main instruments of Soviet state power. It operated totally above the law, spying on dissidents, carrying out espionage, and acting as a secret police force. And because the Soviet Union had lots of enemies, the KGB needed lots of agents. One of the best places to find them was in the country's most prestigious universities. That's exactly where they found a young law student at Leningrad State University named Vladimir Putin. They waited until he graduated before recruiting him. In 1975, lots of KGB agents joined because they basically had no choice. When your country's notorious spy agency asks you to join, it's kind of hard to say no. But Putin joined because he wanted to. He spent his first few years with kgb, pushing papers in a gloomy office in Leningrad. But his first big break arrived when, in the early 1980s, he was summoned to Moscow to attend the agency's elite Foreign Intelligence Training Institute. That's right. It was basically a professional development course for Soviet spies. After he learned how to be a better spy king, Putin was assigned to Dresden, deep in the heart of East Germany. As the boundary between communism and capitalism, East Germany was a rich source of Cold War intrigue and information. This is building number four, Angelika Strasse. Today, it's the regional HQ for an esoteric spiritual movement. But during the Cold War, it was the local KGB station. And for the last five years of the 1980s, it was Vladimir Putin's office. His mission was to recruit Communist Party and Stasi officials, compromise visiting Westerners, and travel undercover to West Germany. It also involved stealing Western technology. Despite being first to space and shocking the west with sputnik. By the 1980s, the Eastern Bloc was lagging way behind the West. After five years in Dresden, Putin returned to Russia and to his old university in Leningrad. Even though his cover story was that he worked as an aide to the dean, everyone knew that Putin was still working for the kgb, spying on and recruiting students. Of course, there wouldn't be a next generation of crack KGB spies working undercover to steal Western technology and NATO secrets. Because the Soviet union collapsed in 1991, brought undone by failed reforms and the pressure of trying to keep up with the United States, Putin could see the end coming before it arrived. By then, he'd quit the KGB to go work for one of his old law professors, a guy named Anatoly Sobchak. So Sobchak was one of the leading voices calling for democratic reforms in the Soviet Union after the Cold War ended. He was elected mayor of Leningrad, which by then had reverted to its original name of St. Petersburg. Putin got a job working for Sobchak at City hall, and he saw how bad things really were. The decline in living standards in Russia after the Cold War is hard to comprehend. Life expectancy at birth plunged by more than five years between 1990 and 1994. Things got so bad that there are stories of people paying for things with bricks because they were worth more than Russian rubles at the time. Even for the millions of Russian people who, by the end, hated the Communist system, the collapse of the Soviet Union brought chaos and humiliation. Russians went from living in a country that went toe to toe with the United States as a superpower to needing handouts. After his boss, Anatoly Sobchak, was Voted out in 1996, Putin went to Moscow. There, for reasons that have never really been explained, he suddenly started moving, moving up really fast in his career. He got a job in the presidential property management department at the Kremlin. It sounds like a boring admin job, but it actually gave Putin lots of leverage to grant or turn down favors to other political insiders. He must have done a lot of effective networking, because his next job after that was as deputy chief of Boris Yeltsin's presidential staff. He was obviously busy, but he still somehow found the time to get what's basically the Russian equivalent of a PhD in economics. Putin's dissertation was about maximizing the value of mineral resources in his home region. It's more than 200 pages of discussion about stuff like the quality of gravel pits in Russia. There are real questions about whether he even wrote it. But believe it or not, Putin's PhD wasn't really about education. It was about ticking the boxes he needed in order to keep advancing in his career. After working for Yeltsin, Putin became director of the fsb, the intelligence agency which replaced the kgb. How did Putin go from being a mid ranking KGB officer in East Germany to running the successor agency less than 10 years later? Maybe there's no conspiracy here. Maybe he was just really great at time management and really great at all the jobs he was given. Or maybe his bosses really liked the dissertation he wrote. But if you worked in Russian politics at the time, you could only climb the ladder as quickly as Putin did. If someone even higher wanted it to happen, however he did it, Putin quickly earned Yeltsin's trust. His timing was perfect. After 30 years in Soviet and Russian politics, which included surviving a coup, Yeltsin was done. He was extremely pessimistic about the problems Russia faced. And his bad health, which was exacerbated by his drinking, meant that he just didn't have the energy to try and fix them. So Yeltsin believed his final act in public life should be to choose the right successor, someone who could do what he had failed to do with rebuild Russia into a world power. He had a few candidates in mind. One of them was his deputy premier, Boris Nemtsov. Nemtsov was very different from Putin. For a start, he had years of actual political leadership experience, having served as a provincial governor and member of parliament. He was also, by the standards of Russian politics, a liberal democrat. Instead of looking to the past for ideas on how to reform Russia, he looked to the West. At one stage, Boris Yeltsin introduced him to Bill Clinton as his chosen successor. Everything appeared to be on track until fate intervened. The day the ruble fell 20%, Vogue magazine held a party for 4,000. Financial crises are complicated. This one is no exception. The basic story is that another market crisis, this one originating in Asia, reduced the price of commodities like oil, gas and metals that the Russian economy was dependent on. As the country's revenue sharply decreased, so did its ability to repay its debts, which were mostly in the form of bonds held by foreign investors. On August 17, 1998, the Russian government defaulted on its debts and was forced to devalue the ruble. It was a disaster for millions of Russians. Yeltsin sacked the Prime Minister and his entire cabinet. But even that didn't contain the fallout. Boris Nemtsov had staked his political legitimacy on making Russia's economy look more like the West. So when it collapsed, he got blamed. He went from receiving more than 50% in a presidential poll to being one of the most hated men in the country. In addition to killing Nemtsov's hopes of being Yeltsin's successor. The financial crisis accelerated Yeltsin's desire to find a replacement and stand down. And eventually, just one real choice Vladimir Putin. But Yeltsin and his inner circle had a problem. The public had no idea who Putin was. It was one thing to name him Prime Minister, yet Yeltsin could do that, no problem. But Russia was meant to be a democracy, and in a democracy, you can't just snap your fingers and make someone the president. They actually had to win an election. Putin had no profile. He wasn't a reformer like Nemtsov. If people had even heard of him, they probably associated him with the kgb. If Russian elites wanted him to win an election, they needed people to know who he was. Which brings us back to those bombings I mentioned at the start of the video. They're a key part of Vladimir Putin's rise to power. So let's construct a timeline. On 9 August 1999, Boris Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin Acting Prime Minister. 26 days later, on the night of September 4, 1999, a truck blew up a barracks in Bunatsk, a garrison town on Russia's border with the breakaway region of Chechnya. Just after midnight on September 9, a bomb went off in the basement of an apartment building in south southeast Moscow. The fsb, the internal security agency that until recently had been run by Vladimir Putin, reported that items removed from the scene contained traces of TNT and another explosive called rdx. Government officials started blaming Chechen terrorists for the attack almost immediately, just after midnight on September 13, authorities were called to check on reports of suspicious activity at an apartment building less than four miles away from the previous bombing site. The they didn't find anything. But just a few hours later, a massive car bomb destroyed a nine story building on the Kashirskoye Highway. Three days later, another bomb blew up near an apartment building in the southern city of Volgodansk. The whole nation was terrified. On the evening of September 22, several residents from the city of Ryazan, about 120 miles southeast of Moscow, saw a white sedan pull up in front of their apartment building. The car's license plate had been altered. The residents also noticed two men removed removing several large sacks from the trunk and carrying them into the basement before driving away at speed. When local police arrived, they found three large sacks wired to a detonator and explosive timer. The bomb was defused and sent away for testing. The next morning, the 23rd, Putin congratulated the local residents on their vigilance and lauded the security forces for foiling what could have been another deadly attack. That same evening, police apprehended the men who who'd been seen loading the sacks into the basement. When they were questioned, they produced FSB identification cards. Remember, the FSB is the agency that ultimately replaced the kgb. And Vladimir Putin, before he became prime minister, was the FSB director. A short time later, a call came from FSB headquarters. The men were to be released. The next morning, September 24, the director of the FSB appeared on national TV. Suddenly, the story had changed. It wasn't a foiled terrorist attack. It was an FSB training exercise meant to test public awareness. And the sacs in the basement didn't contain explosives. They just had sugar in them. The FSB was trying to sweep the whole incident under the rug. And it might have worked until the results came back from the lab. The analysis, which was conducted by the local branch of the fsb, showed that the sacks actually contained rdxthe same explosive that was found at the scene of the bombing at Guryanova street two weeks earlier. But RDX wasn't something you could make at home. In fact, there was only one place you could get it in all of Russia. A heavily guarded facility in the city of Perm, near the Ural mountains and about 1,500 miles from Chechnya. It's details like this that make the official story that the bombings were all orchestrated by Chechen terrorists hard to believe. But the time for asking questions was over. Because at the same time as Putin was praising the residents of Razan for their bravery. Russian warplanes were already launching massive airstrikes on the capital of Chechnya. Ordinary Russians were scared. Their country had gone from being a superpower to a basket case. People were going hungry, losing their savings and dying in their homes. Vladimir Putin promised an end to the chaos under him, order would be restored. People didn't know about the gaps in the official story, or if they did, they pretended not to notice. On March 26, 2000, Vladimir Putin was elected president with 53% of the vote. The people of Russia might not have realized it, but they just made a very fateful decision. Well, Russia at the present time is at a crossroads. The Communists have been defeated, but the ideas of freedom now are on trial. Putin's first major crisis came less than six months into his presidency. This is the Kursk, a nuclear powered Oscar 2 class submarine. @ the time, it was the biggest cruise missile submarine in the world. It was said to be virtually unsinkable. So it was the obvious choice to lead Russia's first major naval exercise in more than 10 years. These exercises were basically a way for Vladimir Putin to show adversaries like NATO in the United States that after a tumultuous few years, Russia was once again a military power. At about 11am on August 12, 2000, deep in the Barents Sea, the crew of the Kursk were given clearance to launch two dummy torpedoes and at the Peter the Great battlecruiser. But the torpedoes detonated prematurely. At 11.29am, nearby Norwegian seismic detectors registered an explosion. Two minutes later, another much larger explosion was detected. The Kursk sank to the seabed. Amazingly, the U.S. defense Secretary, William Cohen, knew about the accident before the Kremlin. The international community quickly offered assistance to try and save any crew who might still be alive. But the Russian government refused all offers of help. Publicly, they said they had everything under control. In reality, they knew the Kursk and its crew were in big Trouble. It took 16 hours to locate the Kursk after it sank, and two days before officials publicly acknowledged that anything was wrong. When they did, they said it was just experiencing minor technical difficulties. In truth, any crew members who survived the initial blast were rapidly recovered. Running out of air. Where was Vladimir Putin in all this? Well, he was on vacation. He actually wasn't even informed of the accident until the day after it happened. The Navy kept telling him that they had it under control and that there was a strong possibility that the accident had been caused by a NATO vessel. If the COVID up was bad, the rescue attempts were even worse. The Russian navy repeatedly failed in their attempts to get into the submarine from his seaside resort. Putin finally agreed to accept outside help, but it was too late. By the time Norwegian divers finally opened a hatch to the submarine, there were no survivors. On August 21, the Russian Navy was finally forced to admit the truth to the public. The Russian media strongly criticized the government response as inept and their explanations as totally unreliable. Putin decided to meet with family members a full 10 days after the sinking. Access to the meeting was tightly controlled. State media's broadcast of the meeting showed only Putin Putin speaking. But inside, the reaction was furious. Two journalists who got in by posing as family members witnessed distraught widows and mothers screaming at the president and demanding to know who would be punished for the disaster. When one extremely emotional mother wouldn't stop interrupting, a nurse popped up behind her and formed forcibly injected her with a sedative. Days later, Larry King asked Putin what happened. This is how he reacted. The Kursk fiasco was terrible for Putin because it challenged the main part of his appeal, keeping Russians safe and restoring the country's status as a great power. Great powers don't lose their best ships in training exercises. And his response made it look like he didn't respond, really care about the people who died or the effect it had on their families. Still, for the first few years of his presidency, most world leaders either didn't see that side of Putin or didn't care. I found it to be very straightforward and trustworthy. I am confident that this new level of cooperation between NATO's members and Russia will now change the world and for the better. Was Putin the KGB mastermind, just tricking these world leaders into thinking he was a good guy? I think the truth is much more complicated and a lot of it has to do with NATO. Remember, NATO was created in order to contain Soviet influence in Europe. So after the end of the Cold War, most people believed the alliance had served its purpose. Western policymakers didn't see any real reason to keep expanding it. They preferred to focus their energies on encouraging Russia to become a democratic, capitalist country. But that began to change in the mid-1990s. Now we have to finish what America started four years ago, welcoming Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic into our alliance. If you look around at who's in the room today, you can see that they are more than willing. Eastern European countries, which had spent decades under Soviet influence, were suspicious of Russia's long term motives. They wanted to join NATO while Russia was still weak, because they knew it wouldn't be weak forever. Polish officials even told A team, team of researchers that if you don't let us into NATO, we're getting nuclear weapons. And Bill Clinton and his team of idealistic foreign policy officials helped make it happen, just as he'd promised. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic all eventually joined the alliance. This was basically Russia's worst nightmare. But it couldn't do anything about it. The next round of NATO expansion in 2004 added seven more countries. Almost all had been part of the Eastern bloc. The three Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were part of the Soviet Union itself. Now they were part of the west, at least in geopolitical terms. For Putin, this shift in the global order was part provocation, part existential threat. NATO was creeping up to his country's doorstep, which threatened to permanently relegate Russia to the status of second tier power in its own region. It had to be stopped. Putin wanted to undermine NATO and destabilize the U. S Led world order in his mind. I'm sure he also wanted to inflict some pain on the countries that in his eyes had humiliated Russia at the end of the Cold War. But he knew there was no way Russia could win a war against NATO. To achieve his goals, Putin would need to find another Strategy. In late 2004, Ukrainians went to the polls to elect a president. They weren't just choosing between two guys with virtually indistinguishable policies. They were choosing between two different visions of what kind of country Ukraine. Ukraine should be. In one corner was the pro Russian incumbent Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. In the other corner was the pro NATO, pro EU opposition leader, Viktor Yushchenko. The man who won would tilt Ukraine closer to the west or closer to Russia. The future of the country was on the line. The Ukrainian parliament had already agreed to the formation of a free trade zone with Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. And Yanukovych had promised to make Russian an official language in Ukraine. You better believe that Vladimir Putin was watching closely. The first round of voting was held on October 31. It was incredibly tight because neither candidate got more than 50% of the votes. A runoff ballot was held on November 21st to determine the winner. The result was still close, but it looked decisive. Yanukovych got almost 900,000 more votes. The geographic distribution of the votes showed a clear east west division, with voters in western Ukraine, Ukraine favoring Yushchenko and those in eastern Ukraine favoring Yanukovych. From the first round to the second round, big increases in turnout were recorded in regions that supported Yanukovych. In his Home district. The turnout went up by more than 40%. Some districts had the old Soviet classic of more than 100% turnout. Viktor Yushchenko was even poisoned with a toxic substance called dioxin. He survived, but was permanently disfigured. International observers immediately sounded the alarm and Ukrainians took to the streets. On November 22, 2004, presidential election results were announced in Ukraine. They were greeted with accusations of vote rigging on a massive scale. The defeated opposition leader, Viktor Yushchenko, called for a national strike and a People's army occupied Kiev's main square. It was dubbed the Orange Revolution, but it was the turning point in a bruising election making marathon. Ukraine was electrified by acts of civil disobedience, sit ins and general strikes. The protests worked. Ukraine's Supreme Court annulled the results of the runoff and ordered another vote for December 26th. The whole world was watching, so Yanukovych and Putin couldn't pull the same tricks. The final results showed a clear victory for Yushchenko, who received about 52% of the vote, compared to Yanukovych's 45%. On January 23, 2005, Viktor Yushchenko was inaugurated President of Ukraine. The Orange Revolution is an important chapter in the political evolution of Vladimir Putin. After years of cementing his rule at home, this was the first time he interfered in the politics of a neighboring country with the goal of installing a pro Kremlin regime. And he failed. But his failure would only deepen his resolve to expand Russia's sphere of influence. Putin understood that in order to turn failure into success, he needed to silence his enemies. Do you remember this man? What about when he looked like this? That's Alexander Litvinenko, three days before he died of polonium poisoning. Until 1998, he was a lieutenant colonel in the KGB, exactly the same rank as Vladimir Putin. But after giving a press conference about an assassination plot, he was fired and then jailed for nine months. When he was released, Litvinenko fled Russia and eventually settled in England. There, with the help of another exile, the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, he waged a years long media campaign against the Putin regime. They asked lots of uncomfortable questions, including about those apartment bombings. Litvinenko was becoming an annoyance. So deep in the heart of the Kremlin, the decision was made to eliminate him. Two Russian ex KGB officers were dying. Dispatched their destination, London, they met with Litvinenko at the millennium Hotel on November 1, 2006. That night he fell ill. Two days later, he was admitted to the hospital under a fake name. As his condition worsened, he told his doctors who he really was and that he'd been poisoned. Testing of Litvinenko's blood and urine detected small gamma ray spikes. A scientist who'd worked on Britain's early atomic bomb project program overheard a conversation and recognized the gamma ray spike as the signature of polonium210. But detecting polonium was very different to treating it. US and UK government officials had never heard of polonium being used as poison before. And no one could save Alexander Litvinenko. It took an agonizing 23 days for him to die. During that time, he wrote a statement blaming Putin for what had happened. After his death, investigators discovered that the assassins had put a lethal dose of the polonium in a teapot at the Millennium Hotel. The assassination of Litvinenko shook the world out of their complacency regarding Putin. As long as he supported the war on terror and kind of looked like a democrat if you didn't look too closely, Western leaders could convince themselves he was on their team. But now they could see the truth. If Putin could have one of his enemies killed like that in a Western capital, he was capable of anything. With the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, Vladimir Putin showed everyone in the west who he really was. And the thing is, he was still a popular leader in Russia. Lots of Russians still remembered the Cold War and the shock therapy administered by Western economists throughout the 1990s. To them, Putin was restoring Russia to its rightful place as a world power in its own right and a counterweight to the west and the United States. He was also growing the economy. The US Invasion of Iraq was one of the factors that led to a massive increase in the price of oil and gas, which the Russian economy depended on. Between 2003 and mid 2008, the price of crude oil rose from $30 per barrel to almost $150 per barrel. That translated to rapid economic growth. Russia's GDP grew by an average of 7% per year. Real disposable incomes doubled. Doubled. Putin was helping Russians become wealthier while also asserting their interests abroad. In early 2007, he attended the Munich Security Conference and gave a speech which would become a major turning point in his rhetoric toward the West. In language that was increasingly candid for such a setting, Putin accused the United States and the west of arrogance, hypocrisy, and violating democracy. This is a world of one master, one sovereign. They constantly teach Russia thus democracy. But those who teach us, for some reason, do not really want to learn. This speech is absolutely key to understanding Putin's worldview. Fifteen years before he invaded Ukraine and five years before Xi Jinping became the leader of China, Putin was telling the world that Russia wanted a multipolar world order. In other words, he wanted a system that represented capitalism, democracy and other Western values to become less powerful. The speech was music to the ears of nationalists in Russia and contributed to his popularity at home. There was just one hitch. According to Russia's constitution, he couldn't actually serve a third term as president. So he hatched a scheme with his loyal Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev. Medvedev would become president and Putin would serve as Prime Minister. It was blatant subversion of democracy. Everyone could see it was a way for Putin to maintain his grip on power and install someone who would keep the seat warm for him. More than 71% of Russians voted for Medvedev to become the figurehead president. Despite no longer being president, Putin's grip on power was stronger than ever. And with things secure at home, he was ready to focus on undermining the established world order. The leaders of NATO begin a two day summit today that looks set to highlight the pressures straining the fabric of the alliance should NATO agree to get give membership action plans to Georgia and Ukraine. Russia was extremely nervous about the prospect of countries on its borders joining NATO. Which meant that when NATO released a communique which said that Ukraine and Georgia will become members of NATO, it immediately set off alarm bells. Those membership action plans actually never ended up happening. But in Putin's eyes, that didn't matter. From his perspective, allowing Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO amounted to a direct threat to Russia, and he had to respond. His first target was Georgia. Georgia's pro Western government was perpetually in conflict with South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two breakaway regions on its border with Russia. Both regions, which had lots of native Russian speakers, had declared their independence. Most of the international community didn't recognize those declarations, but Russia did. And what's more, Russia was providing separatists in those regions with weapons and other support. The fighting between Russia and Georgia over the Georgian breakaway region of South Ossetia. President Bush has told Russian leaders that military action against Georgia is unacceptable. Tensions reached a breaking point on August 1, 2008. Separatist forces started shelling Georgian villages. Georgia responded by sending in the military to take control of a separatist town. The Russian government claimed, falsely that Georgia was committing genocide against separate Ossetia. They used it as a pretext to launch a full scale invasion, including into undisputed Georgian territory. Russia's decisive military strength meant the war was over in five days. Putin had sent a clear message to Georgia and other countries in Eastern Europe that were thinking about joining NATO after failing to install his chosen candidate in Ukraine. The war against Georgia showed that Putin was running a different playbook in order to destabilize a pro Western neighbor. Why try and rig an election when you could just arm separatists? As an imperial power, Russia has always looked to maintain spheres of influence on its borders. That's a big reason why as soon as Putin saw there was a chance of Georgia joining NATO, he tried to depose its president. Winning wars against small countries was popular with Russians who yearned for the good old days. But there were still lots of Russians who cared about things like democracy. And they were about to make themselves heard. Tens of thousands packed the streets of of Moscow and the biggest anti government demonstrations Russia has seen for 20 years. They shouted Putin is a thief and Russia without Putin. Protesters accused Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his United Russia party of corruption and rigging parliamentary elections last weekend. Russia's 2011 parliamentary election had lots in common with the Ukrainian presidential runoff that led to the Orange Revolution, on top of irregularities that Russians had grown used to since Putin became leader. Like debates between random candidates at 7am, cell phone footage showed blatant violations of electoral laws. Videos were quickly uploaded to social media, which Putin didn't control at the time. People saw the evidence with their own eyes, but there was no way for the election results to be overturned. In Ukraine, the Supreme Court annulled the results of the runoff, but the same wasn't going to happen in Russia. Putin's party, United Russia, maintained its parliamentary majority. More than 100,000 brave people went out onto the streets. They weren't just protesting the election results. They were protesting that their country had been turned into a dictatorship. Presidential elections were due in early 2012. Everyone knew Putin would get his old job back. His preferred candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, was even back as President of Ukraine. Russian civil society may have been defiant, but the country's institutions and political opposition had been totally neutral. Neutralized. Putin could only see one threat to his rule. Putin built his own anxieties into his 2012 presidential campaign. He compared the political situation in Russia to Napoleon's attempted invasion 200 years earlier and said that national sovereignty was paramount. He got almost 2/3 of the votes from a tired and defeated electorate. And just like that, he was president again. It sounds weird, but Putin's most important political view victory of 2012 didn't happen in Moscow. It happened three and a half thousand miles away in Beijing. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have a lot in common. They're just six months apart in age. Their fathers both fought in World War II. They met at an economic cooperation summit in 2013. The day they met was actually Putin's birthday. Xi Jinping presented him with a cake while the Russian president pulled out a bottle of vodka. As far as we can tell, they've actually become friends. Putin was the first world leader that Xi Jinping visited after becoming China's president. And they've had more than 40 meetings since then. Most importantly, they're allies with a common geopolitical creating a multipolar world order. Xi came along at the perfect time for Putin. On its own, Russia can't take on NATO or the United States. Its military isn't strong enough, its economy isn't big enough, and its diplomacy isn't effective enough. China might be different from as soon as he gained power. Xi Jinping has made it clear that his ultimate foreign policy aim is to displace the United States as the world's most powerful country. Putin wants to weaken the west while expanding Russia's sphere of influence. It was the beginning of an important partnership. Vladimir Putin survived massive protests at home and brushed off criticism from the international community. His rivals were sidelined and his critics were dead, in jail or in exile. He was further annoying the west by supporting the Syrian president, Bashar Al Assad, in the civil war that had engulfed the country. There were even whispers that he had secretly become one of the world's richest men by embezzling money and extorting the country's oligarchs. He had achieved absolute power at home. And in Xi Jinping, he had a powerful new ally. But the mission he had been training for decades had only been really just started. Because as Putin began his third term as president in 2012, he was still missing the biggest piece of the puzzle. Ukraine. Why is Ukraine so important for Putin? Because it matters to Russia's past and its future. Let me explain. Ukraine has been central to Russian identity and power for centuries. Christianity was imported from Byzantium to the Slavic people via Kyiv. And Christianity served as the anchor for Kyivan Rus, the early state from which Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians draw their cultural lineage. Today, those close links have remained. Most Ukrainians can speak at least some Russian. And Eastern Ukraine was historically home to a large ethnic Russian minority. Ukraine was also strategically vital for Russian interests. As Europe's second largest country, it contributed massive amounts of grain Coal and steel to the Soviet Soviet Union. Ukrainian factories were a vital part of the USSR's military industrial capacity. Russian tsars spent their summers on the beautiful beaches of the Crimean peninsula, which also hosted the country's largest warm water naval port. And through to the modern day, Ukraine's location on the Black Sea and on the border with numerous Eastern European states and future NATO members was vital to Russian interests. The two countries have been so closely intertwined throughout history that that most Russian nationalists, Putin included, don't actually think Ukraine is a separate country. Putin even wrote an entire essay about it in 2021. Putin believed that Russians and Ukrainians were a single people, united by history and divided by a meddling West. The vast majority of Ukrainians disagreed. But Putin has made a career out of not caring what people think. Losing Ukraine had undermined Russian power. Losing it permanently to the west would, in Putin's eyes, be a major ongoing threat to Russian security. The error needed to be corrected. A miracle didn't happen and European Union leaders and Ukraine have, as expected, failed to sign an historic free trade deal. After a last minute U turn From Kiev on November 21, 2013, a week before the summit in Lithuania, Yanukovych announced he wouldn't sign it. Who knows what exactly made him change his mind. But the U turn made millions of Ukrainians realize that so long as their government was taking orders from Moscow, they could never be truly free. To be free, they needed a revolution. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets across Ukraine. Kyiv's Independence Square was turned into a massive protest camp with barricades, broadcasting facilities and stages for lectures and speeches. Events escalated further in early 2014 when Yanukovych signed draconian anti protest laws. But that couldn't stop the protesters. Even when security forces started firing, killing almost 100 of them, they didn't stop. Stop. They wanted Yanukovych out. They soon got their wish. Yanukovych fled and it didn't surprise anyone when he resurfaced days later in Russia. The Ukrainian parliament restored the constitution to its 2004 version. An interim government signed the EU deal. A former businessman became president. The events of February 2014 became known in Ukraine as the revolution of dignity. The future of Ukraine suddenly looked bright. But Vladimir Putin wasn't about to accept defeat. Soldiers began appearing in the southern Ukrainian province of Crimea and they came to be known as the little green men. Within a couple of weeks, the whole of Crimea was under the control of these little green men. For weeks, Putin denied these little green men were Russian soldiers. Claiming instead they were local militia who'd seized Ukrainian weapons. Eventually, he couldn't deny the they were Russian soldiers, although Putin. And admit it, some of the soldiers weren't fighting under the Russian flag. Some were mercenaries under the command of Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman known as Putin's chef because he ran a catering business which staged banquets for the Kremlin. And now those mercenaries, together with the Russian soldiers and the rest of the little green men, were occupying the territory of a foreign country. Crimea had been one of the most prized possessions of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. But in 1950. In 1954, the leader of the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev, transferred control of Crimea to Ukraine, partly to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Ukraine's union with Russia. Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, so as long as the Soviet Union existed, it didn't really matter too much. But of course, the Soviet Union collapsed and suddenly Crimea belonged to a different country. That was terrible news for nationalists like Putin. To them, Crimea was part of Russia. But during the 1990s and 2000s, not only was Russia too weak to try and take it back, it didn't have the right opportunity. Ukraine's revolution of dignity changed that. It created a power vacuum which allowed Putin to run a version of the same playbook that he'd employed in Georgia six years before. On March 6, the Crimean parliament, which, remember the little green men had actually occupied, voted to hold hold a snap referendum on independence and the prospect of joining Russia. 97% of Crimeans said they were in favor of joining Russia. It's absolutely true that there was genuine support for Russia, especially in the southern and eastern regions of Ukraine, where cultural ties to Russia were stronger. But I'll leave it up to you to decide if the vote was totally fair or not. It didn't matter. Putin had his pretext. Soldiers, this time time bearing the official insignia of the Russian military, moved in. They quickly surrounded all of Ukraine's military bases in the region. And on the 18th, Putin announced the formal incorporation of Crimea into Russia. It's not like anyone was under any illusion about Vladimir Putin, but even by those standards, this was an escalation. The annexation of Crimea was the first time a European country seized territory from another European country in the 21st century. It was a shock to everyone who had kind of assumed that war, war in Europe was a thing of the past. From there, things moved really fast. Armed pro Russian separatists in the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, an area collectively known as the Donbass declared independence from Ukraine and the fighting began. Russia covertly provided the separatists with weapons while massing thousands of soldiers on Ukraine's eastern border. By the end of April, Ukraine had lost control of Donetsk and Luhansk to the separatists. International authorities warned commercial airlines to not fly over eastern Ukraine, but tragically, the warning came too late. The terrible first moment after flight MH17 was shot down, local villagers struggled to prevent the fires spreading to their crops. The shooting down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 made everyone in the world realize that they had to pay attention to what was happening in the Donbass. Until then, lots of people could convince themselves that it didn't really matter. It was just fighting in a faraway place they hadn't heard of. But this was a passenger plane with casualties from 10 different countries. And when investigators learned that the plane had been shot down by pro Russian separatists using a surface to air missile which they had imported from Russia, the international community was outraged. It was a very tense moment. World wars have been started over less. Thankfully, the moment passed without further escalation. All sides, Ukraine, Russia and the two so called people's republics, agreed on a roadmap to ending the war in late 2019. It quickly failed, mostly because of repeated breaches by the Russian side. But that's exactly how Putin wanted it. He didn't want to end the fighting. Deep in the heart of the Kremlin, isolated from his advisors because of his paranoia about COVID 19, Vladimir Putin decided that he would finally undo the catastrophe brought about by the collapse of the Soviet Union. He would invade Ukraine and reattach it to Russia by force. Most people, at least in the west, never believed he'd do it. They thought it was an irrational move that would only serve to galvanize the west and push Ukraine toward NATO. But he did it anyway. On February 24, 2022, after weeks of preparation, Russian troops crossed Ukraine's northern border, including from neighboring Belarus, from Donetsk and Luhansk in the east, and from the south via Crimea. CCTV footage captured some of the first moments of the invasion. It wasn't the beginning of a war, it was the escalation of one which began when those little green men started showing up in Crimea. And of course, according to Putin, it was not a war at all. It was a special military operation. No one knows how the war in Ukraine will end, but in many ways it's already been a failure. Putin expected Ukraine and the west to collapse. Ukraine itself has been incredibly resilient and Almost a quarter of a century after the Kursk disaster, Russia has shown supreme surprising weakness in terms of tactics and hardware. And rather than quickly seizing Ukraine, Putin has massively increased the importance of NATO and brought the west into the closest security partnership it's had for decades. Finland has joined NATO. It looks like Sweden will join soon, too. And there are serious discussions underway about Ukraine joining as well. Putin's invasion has drawn clear battle lines. On one side, there's the West, a grouping which now includes Ukraine. And on the other side, there's Russia, China and their allies. Less than three weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin visited Beijing. There, he signed what China called a no limits partnership. Since the invasion began, Chinese officials have been careful to not refer to it as war, while also repeating Putin's narrative that NATO expansion was to blame. The two countries have deepened their cooperation in several areas. China is now now Russia's number one trading partner and has propped up Russia's economy by buying their oil, natural gas and advanced weapons systems. The two countries conduct joint military exercises on a near monthly basis, and their generals regularly discuss how to overcome strategic threats such as US nuclear modernization and missile defense. In March 2023, Xi Jinping visited Russia to see Vladimir Putin for the first time since the invasion. The two men pledged to shape a new world order and drive changes not seen in a century. It sounds like their friendship is going pretty well. In addition to changing global geopolitics, Putin's invasion has also changed Russia. As the war started to drag on and the easy victory that Putin expected didn't materialize, key Russian military leaders began grumbling. One of the loudest critics was someone I mentioned earlier, Putin's chef, Yevgeny Prigozhin. Prigozhin runs the Wagner Group, a shadowy mercenary organization that first appeared in Crimea in 2014, but since then has exerted Russian influence by proxy in places like Syria, Libya and Mali. And since late 2022, he's been saying what everyone in the Russian army is scared to say. The war is going badly. In October, he criticized the decision to withdraw from a key city in eastern Ukraine. In February of 2023, he recorded messages on telegram accusing Russia's most senior general and the country's defense minister of withholding ammunition and supplies from his soldiers. So of treason, basically. And in early June, he said the Wagner Group wouldn't sign a contract with the Defense Ministry. But I think it's fair to say that no one expected the escalation that happened on June 23rd. In a half hour video, Prigozhin directly accused the Russian military of attacking Wagner's fighters in in Ukraine, while also directly contradicting all of Putin's justifications for the war, saying the war wasn't needed to return Russian citizens to our bosom, nor to demilitarize or denazify Ukraine. The war was needed so that a bunch of animals could simply exalt in glory. But this time, Prigozhin wouldn't just settle for talking. He directed his fighters to go on the offensive. Within hours, they had captured major military buildings in Rostov on Don, Russia's ninth largest city and a major staging point for the invasion. And an armored column was moving in the direction of Moscow. Unconfirmed reports even suggested that the Wagner group shot down several Russian military aircraft. Putin quickly mobilized troops to defend the capital and gave a speech, calling the rebellion a knife in the back. Plane tracking data suggested that the presidential plane flew north out of Moscow before switching off its transponder and going dark. And then, just as quickly as the rebellion or mutiny or coup, whatever you want to call it, had started, it was over. The President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, said he'd struck a deal to end the conflict and provide Prigozhin with safe harbor in Belarus. As one tweet put it, the Wagner rebellion is like if a bunch of disgruntled Blackwater vets took San Diego, except it's even worse, because then the Blackwater vets made it almost all the way to Washington, D.C. before Joe Biden. Biden cut a deal with Justin Trudeau to take in their leader, while also dropping all criminal charges. Was it an attempted coup? Was it just a feud between different factions? Did Prigozhin get some kind of deal in exchange for turning his soldiers around? How much will this help Ukraine? As I'm recording this, there aren't really any clear answers, but it's safe to say one it's really bad news for Vladimir Putin. His former ally publicly called the war corrupt, revealed massive problems inside of Russia's military, and then seized one of the country's most important cities almost without a fight. And all Putin could do was give a speech and then seemingly let him escape without punishment. Almost 25 years after he climbed to the top of Russian politics, maybe the world is now seeing another side of Vladimir Putin, the weak leader who's losing control. At the start of this video, I asked some questions, like, who is Vladimir Putin? What does he want, and why did he invade Ukraine? Vladimir Putin is a spy, politician, nationalist, and a gangster who wants to be an emperor. He's also one of the most important people in the world. And every day since he started as a junior KGB officer, he's been on a mission to restore Russia's standing as a world power, and in the process, to weaken the West. So far, he's mostly failed. Russia is still in decline, and he can't do much about it. His invasion of Ukraine has brought the west as close as it's been for decades. And the Wagner group's rebellion has shown that his grip on power may be more tenuous than it's ever been. But he's found an incredibly important ally, Xi Jinping. Their friendship is a big problem for everyone who cares about democracy, human rights, and a stable international system. And it might end up being the most important part of Vladimir Putin's legacy. And to better understand this dynamic, you need to watch this video about Xi Jinping next. Thanks a lot.