When disaster looms, western world leaders talk. They hold meetings, convene summits, debate with each other via their UN ambassadors and have conversations with their most senior advisers behind closed doors. Then they face the media to tell us what is happening, but the process does not end there. These days, especially if the crisis involves Russia, these leaders, diplomats and advisers – and their Russian opposite numbers – sit down two or three years later with the documentarian Norma Percy to tell us what really happened.
This is the conceit of Percy’s addictive recent-history series Putin Vs the West, which previously covered the fraught eight years leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In a two-part update that adds the dark postscript “At War” to the title, the unthinkable has happened. Yet, despite the calamitous subject matter, Percy maintains her knack for showing that diplomacy is a chaotic game of bluff and theatrics that is often downright funny.
