Impressive – but worrying – inside view of Russia’s war

Where would we be without mobile phones? The UN Security Council was holding a meeting on February 24, 2022 when news started coming through that Russia had invaded Ukraine. The extraordinary moment was captured in the second series of the documentary

Putin vs the West (BBC Two). Instead of hearing of the invasion from the Russian ambassador, who was right there in the room, council members were alerted by their phones starting to vibrate in unison and were filmed staring in disbelief at their screens.

Until that moment, according to the Ukrainian ambassador, “many of my colleagues sincerely believed that full-scale invasion was not possible”. The UN Secretary-general, António Guterres, asked the Russian ambassador what he knew. “This is the first I heard,” was the reply.

Film-maker Norma Percy delivered three episodes of this series last year, covering the decade leading up to the invasion. These two new episodes cover the first year of the war, with world leaders and their advisers among the contributors.

It is history as told by the people responsible for making the decisions, and Percy’s access is impressive. The early consensus was that the Russian army would roll over the Ukrainians in a matter of days and everyone should just wait for the inevitable. Of course, it didn’t turn out like that. “Ukrainian fighters took the best punch the Russians could give them. They demonstrated that they were still standing, and that made all the difference,” said CIA director Bill Burns.

We hear details of discussions between nations over economic sanctions and weapons supply. Ben Wallace told how, as defence secretary, he would have whisky-themed, coded conversations about weapons systems with his Ukrainian counterpart because they did not have a sufficiently secure line of communication. “I’m going to send you some Glenfiddich” was a reference to anti-tank missiles.

Boris Johnson is the only leader to crack jokes (the UK is represented over this timespan by three prime ministers). Of his talks with Chinese president Xi Jinping, Johnson said: “He dead-batted everything that I said. More dead bats than a Wuhan cave.”

But China’s power is no laughing matter. Nor is the Russian threat. Vasily Nebenzya, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, says of Finland’s request to join Nato: “Their very good relations with Russia were their asset. Which they squandered. We never had any missile directed at Finland… But this changed. And of course that will be taken into account in our political and military planning.” Quite worrying.

It has come to something when the best way the police can convince the public of their essential goodness is to invite a documentary crew to film them rooting out the bad. But it’s a welcome exercise in transparency. To Catch a Copper

(Channel 4) follows the work of the counter-corruption unit in one force, Avon and Somerset.

The cases featured in this first episode were of varying levels of seriousness. Two officers were filmed – on their own bodycams – treating a disabled mental health patient with mockery after being asked to help in returning her to hospital. That was at the mild end of things. Far more shocking were the two female constables answering a call about a suicidal woman who had threatened to jump from Bristol’s Clifton Suspension Bridge. Almost immediately, they arrested her for causing a public nuisance, and treated her with what looked on screen like excessive force – holding her by the hair or with a hand around her neck, then pepper-spraying her while she was handcuffed in the back of the car.

Those two officers resigned before their case was heard, and I hope they never turn up in another job that involves interacting with the public. A year-long investigation by the complaints watchdog did not refer the case to the Crown Prosecution Service despite the chief constable saying their actions could constitute assault. In 2022, the programme said, over 81,000 cases went through the Independent Office for Police Conduct, and fewer than one per cent resulted in formal misconduct proceedings.

As for the third case: a married on-duty sergeant, Lee Cocking, offered to give an extremely drunk woman a lift home from a nightclub, then had sex with her in a layby. She reported him; he claimed that she had jumped on him and he had been too emotionally fragile to resist her advances because policing had given him PTSD. A jury cleared him of any criminal offence. He was also cleared of misconduct. The police have a long way to go in restoring that public trust.

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