Putin, all the time I dealt with him,
you knew you were dealing with a difficult and dangerous
and potentially very bad man.
He mourns the loss of the Soviet Union.
He wants to recover territory where he can.
He's very hostile to the West and Western values.
Vladimir Putin has rocked the foundations of European security.
This is the story of Putin's path to war.
How and why he wrong-footed the West through a decade of clashes...
..told by the leaders who locked horns with him.
I was clear, there could be no business as usual with Russia.
In this episode, as the uprisings of the Arab Spring tear through
the Middle East, the West tries to enlist Putin as peacemaker.
Having been an irrelevant factor in the Middle East for so long,
suddenly the Russians are back.
But the Russian President, exploiting the West's inaction,
shows just how far he's willing to go to keep his allies in power.
Putin doesn't care about the loss of life.
He doesn't care about the damage he inflicts.
He doesn't care about what he does to civilians.
By February 2011, the revolutions of the Arab Spring had
overthrown dictators.
First in Tunisia, then in Egypt.
Fearing he could be next,
Libya's Colonel Gaddafi ordered his forces to slaughter his opponents.
Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.
Western leaders thought military intervention was the only way
to stop a massacre, but they wanted UN approval.
The obstacle was Russia.
American Vice President Joe Biden flew to Moscow.
The Soviets and the Russians never had supported
intervention in the domestic affairs of ANY country.
And so we set out on a rather ambitious idea to try
to get the Russians to abstain on a Security Council resolution.
I thought it was going to fail.
Prime Minister.
Vladimir Putin was now Prime Minister,
after serving two terms as President -
the legal limit.
It's in our self-interest and I hope in the self-interest of Russia
that our relationship's closer.
It's always interesting to meet with Putin.
He's a very engaging guy.
He speaks very bluntly.
We did have a general discussion about the Arab Spring.
It was just classic Vladimir Putin,
articulating that he's against people rising up against dictators.
This is not the business of the external world.
These are the leaders of these countries.
We have to respect sovereignty.
Even before the Arab Spring, President...President Putin
had said that about earlier events in history.
He called them colour revolutions.
Georgia 2003, Ukraine 2004,
where in his view, it wasn't just citizens rising up
for democracy, it was the US sponsoring regime change.
Mr President. Nice to see you. Great to see you, man.
Biden also went to see Dmitry Medvedev. As Russia's President,
he was in charge of foreign policy.
Good. That's good. Good meeting.
The Vice President framed things very broadly, to say that we
didn't start the Arab Spring generally,
we didn't start what was happening in Libya specifically.
But we cannot let innocent people just be slaughtered.
We are not being passive in this effort.
When we got to the idea of doing something to stop the killing,
President Medvedev jumped in pretty quickly.
He basically said, yes, you're right.
But he also said there have to be parameters here,
we're not in the business of regime change,
we're in the business of saving lives.
I was pleasantly shocked
and surprised that there was a difference,
that Medvedev was supporting our position.
A vote at the United Nations would be the test of who was really
calling the shots in Moscow.
The question of course was Russia.
Because Russia has always had a close relationship with Libya.
I suspected that Russia could at some moment actually
oppose our drive.
I introduced the British draft,
which had the no-fly zone, that had increased sanctions
against Gaddafi, condemnation of the violence against civilians, etc.
But the Russians were not really engaging in the detail
of the negotiation, which was very unusual
because the Russians are very big players in the UN Security Council.
Very active, normally in a negative way, but very active.
A decisive vote at the Security Council, ten countries
backing military action against Colonel Gaddafi's regime.
Five countries, including Russia and China, abstained,
but without using a veto.
Medvedev's decision not to veto
allowed the West to start bombing Libya.
But his Prime Minister could not stay silent for long.
Prime Minister Putin never publicly criticised President Medvedev.
And that level of disdain for what his own president did,
I don't remember a moment in history when that happened.
The Russian President was quick to hit back.
The US President picked up the phone to his counterpart.
Obama wanted to reassure him that we're going to commit to
implementing the objectives that we set out at the very beginning
of this operation,
to stop what we thought was going to be genocide.
Not regime change, not the overthrow of Gaddafi.
But soon Obama and his allies hardened their stance.
It is US policy that Gaddafi needs to go.
It is impossible to imagine a future for Libya with Gaddafi
still in power. He must go.
As the West's bombing of Libya intensified,
leaders of the world's largest economies met.
Medvedev and Obama spoke in private.
I can't remember a time I'd ever seen Medvedev
so angry with President Obama.
He felt betrayed that we had gone farther in Libya than he had planned
and what had happened in Libya was confirming what Prime Minister Putin
was saying, that this was going to be another regime change play,
just like Afghanistan, and especially Iraq.
And he was planning to run for re-election.
His main argument for re-election was,
I have developed this new relationship with the United States
and with the West that is good for Russia's national interest.
And he knew as a result of what happened on the ground
in Libya that he was losing that argument to the one guy
he couldn't lose that argument to, Vladimir Putin.
Putin.
Within a month of announcing his bid to return to the Kremlin,
Putin's dire predictions came true.
Gaddafi was hunted down and brutally murdered,
and Libya lurched into chaos.
The next leader under threat was Russia's long-time ally,
President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.
His forces were ruthlessly cracking down on any protests.
It was our calculation that there could not be
any peace settlement in Syria
without the Russians putting pressure on the Assad regime
to make it happen. We didn't have the leverage.
Syria had signed arms contracts with Russia, worth $4 billion.
And the country was home to Russia's only naval base
outside the former Soviet Union.
Our strategy was to focus on them.
Convince the Russians, they'll convince the Syrians.
The West's first chance to test the water with Russia was at the UN.
I really remember that we went to the Russian mission because
they have the official portrait of Putin, you know, like in, well,
you have the Queen, they have Putin. And Putin, the official portrait
of Putin is, he has sort of totally empty eyes.
It's terrifying, because suddenly you say, oh, my God,
if I was in a cellar, you know, tied to a chair
in front of him, I would really be terrified by this guy.
We had a late-night negotiation with the Russian ambassador,
Vitaly Churkin, and we reached agreement on a text,
which talked about if Assad didn't stop attacking civilians, then
the Security Council would consider further steps.
So a sort of...a small stepping stone towards coercive measures.
We had the feeling Churkin might play along. He had
said to us, "I will try to sell it to Moscow."
And I rang Churkin at eight o'clock in the morning on the day
of the vote and said, "Have you received instructions from Moscow?
"How are you going to vote?"
And he said, "I think it'll be OK."
So I put the phone down and thought that was great.
And then 20 minutes later he rang me back and said,
"This text is totally unacceptable, and we will veto it."
What we see is the policy of regime change
and we believe this is very dangerous.
Vitaly Churkin really became the voice of his master.
And we felt all the Russian mission was becoming
a sort of a stronghold,
that obviously they had decided that Syria was their vital interest.
That was the moment where we could feel this is
the Putinisation of Russian foreign policy.
Having seen leaders toppled across the Middle East, Putin was
soon facing protests against his own rule.
The biggest demonstrations in Moscow since the end of the Soviet Union.
He still won the election by a landslide.
Three months later, Putin arrived at the annual G20 Summit.
It was Obama's first chance to talk to him about Syria face-to-face.
Putin was 45 minutes late.
So it already had a tense feeling by the time he showed up.
You know, as I listened to Putin in Los Cabos, describing
Assad as the only person that could bring stability
and order to Syria, I heard Chechnya as his model.
There was a violent situation in Chechnya and he didn't negotiate
a pacted transition between the opposition and the regime.
What he did is he just gave his guy more weapons and said,
"Kill as many people as you want,"
and that is the way that he restored order in Chechnya.
And that was the argument I heard him make.
Relations between Obama and Putin were faltering.
But that summer, the British Prime Minister saw an opportunity
to repair the West's relationship with the Russian leader.
We used the Olympics to try and
further some bilateral relations.
I must have had dozens of meetings,
and one of those was Vladimir Putin, who was coming over,
and someone on my team said, "He's a judo enthusiast,
"why don't we take him to the judo?"
Putin congratulated David Cameron on the success of the British
opening ceremony, which was the talk of the moment.
And Cameron said, "Well, of course,
"I had great British assets to play with, Vladimir.
"I had Her Majesty the Queen and 007 and Mr Bean."
And then he offered Putin help preparing the Sochi Olympics,
which were coming next.
And I remember Putin saying, "Well, there's a Jewish saying,
"that if a problem can be solved by money, it is not a problem."
Then they turned to Syria.
While of course there have been some differences in the positions
that we've taken over the Syrian conflict,
we both want to see an end to that conflict and a stable Syria.
So David Cameron said, "This isn't another Libya,
"we don't intend any kind of Western military action,
"we're not interested in us going to war in Syria,
"we want a political outcome."
And in response Putin said, "Well, I'm the same.
"We're at a moment in history uniquely
"when Russian troops are not deployed anywhere abroad,
"and I'm very proud of that, and that's the way I want it to stay.
"I don't intend any kind of Russian military
"adventurism in the Middle East either."
Putin said there was a lot of wrong with Assad's
leadership in Syria, they did lots of bad things
and he kept saying,
"Look, I'm not an Assad supporter, I'm not determined to keep him in
"power, but the point is I'm worried about what will happen if he goes,
"and there will be a vacuum there which even worse people will fill."
We have seen what's happened in Iraq.
We have seen what has happened in Libya,
and when we were making another analysis,
what is the plan by Western countries in Syria,
we have seen that the only point they would like to make is to
bring down Assad. When we were asking the counterparts,
who is going to replace Assad, there was no answer.
It was, let us just bring him down, like with Gaddafi,
let's kill Gaddafi and we will see what's going to happen.
They couldn't provide names - no plan, no names, nothing.
How did the meeting go?
So I went and sat with him watching this judo match,
which included a Russian judoka.
And it was very fascinating because the umpire called the result
one way, and Putin turned to me and said, "I don't think that's right."
Suddenly, the umpire was overruled by the other umpires
and turned out Putin was right, and knew more about judo
than the person who was umpiring the match.
Ippon! Oh, it's an ippon!
And then he won the final
and Putin was clearly absolutely thrilled by this.
Ladies and gentlemen,
please show your appreciation for your new Olympic champion.
But I remember saying to him,
you should go down and congratulate him and shake his hand.
And he said, "I can't do that." And I said, "No, you should, I think
"it's a perfectly good thing to do. Go, you should do it."
One of the most powerful men in the world...
..meets Vladimir Putin.
Later that evening he rang me from his aeroplane, to make a point
about how much he had enjoyed coming to the Olympics, how much it meant,
how he wanted to have a positive and purposeful relationship.
And it sounded like there had been some
celebrations on the flight back, to be frank.
He was saying things that I've never heard him
say before, about literally what a wonderful day it had been.
It was a new side to him.
And that's when it really began to occur to us
that maybe we could pull something off here.
You know, maybe we have de-iced Putin.
In Syria, what had started as a government crackdown had now
become a bloody civil war.
Assad's regime was accused of cluster-bombing civilian areas.
More than 60,000 people had been killed by the time
John Kerry took office as Secretary of State.
We condemn this indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians,
and we condemn it in the strongest terms.
And it is just further evidence that Assad has to go.
Kerry flew to Moscow, hoping to convince Putin.
Things got off to a bad start when he was told to wait on the runway.
I began to wonder, do the Russians always do this to put us
in a bad mood before these meetings?
We got out and walked around on the tarmac
just so he could stretch his legs.
We eventually got permission to drive into the city.
But we were told Putin's been delayed...
..and I explained to Kerry, this is pretty standard operating procedure.
Don't over-react. He does this to everybody.
He did it to President Obama.
They took us on a tour of Red Square.
It was all decorated for the May 9th celebrations.
The Secretary of State waited three hours before he was
summoned to the Kremlin.
How are you?
I was struck by Putin's mood that day.
He was not as provocative as he had been with Obama in Los Cabos
the year before.
We share some very significant common interests
with respect to Syria.
So it's my hope that today we'll be able to dig into that a little bit.
We wanted a signal from President Putin in that meeting,
and he gave us that signal.
It was very clear. He said, "Work with Lavrov.
"He's my guy." He was sitting right there.
Putin's Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, took Kerry for a stroll
around the grounds of his official guesthouse.
At the end of their walk, they said, "We're back in business.
"We're going to try to resuscitate multilateral negotiations
"over Syria."
Kerry proposed a transitional government that would see
Assad depart, as the way to stop the bloodshed.
At the Secretary of State's request, I talked to Lavrov about what
a transition government in Syria would look like...
..and the key jobs that would have to be on a negotiating agenda.
After about 10 or 15 seconds, Foreign Minister Lavrov just
cut me off, and said, "You Americans are always trying
"social engineering, and you did it in Iraq too, and we will not
"stand for it in Syria, we will have nothing to do with this."
It is not for us to decide who should lead Syria.
It is for the Syrians to decide.
And we are not in the regime-change game.
We are against interference in domestic conflicts,
and this is our position which should be of no surprise to anyone.
The Secretary of State had been knocked back.
But David Cameron, who'd been invited by Putin to the
site of the Winter Olympics, was determined to pursue his own pitch.
We flew to Sochi and it was a big deal for us.
We were trying to really lock Putin into a result which was Assad going.
Putin always had this big pile of briefing cards...
..and he picks them up and he slaps them down on the table -
I can hear that slap to this day - and says,
"OK, David, let's talk."
He said, "I know you think I'm too supportive of Assad. I think
"your policy of backing the opposition means
"you're backing extremists like the Al-Nusra Front."
And I said, "No,
"our policy is to get a new provisional government,
"we can ally with that provisional government,
"and then we can take out the Al-Nusra Front and the dangerous
"Islamist extremists and terrorists that threaten us."
And Cameron said, "The Al-Nusra Front, I want to destroy them."
And Putin said, "David, now you're talking my language."
And then Cameron said, "OK, and we're going to create a political
"process, you're going to be on the world stage dictating what happens."
All this was music to Putin's ears.
I was suggesting a conference in Moscow where the transition
to a provisional authority would get the rubber stamp.
There was a potential opportunity. You could see the end of Assad,
you could see the end of the fighting and the bloodshed.
So there was an opening and there was hope.
After lunch, in a grand gesture, Vladimir Putin grabbed David
and dragged him off, wearing his shades,
looking like a man of action, into a jeep
and drove him off in the opposite direction of all the rest of us.
He drove at breakneck speed off to a helicopter.
We jumped on a helicopter, we flew up into the mountains.
Putin was inordinately proud of all that they were doing
to make sure the Winter Olympics was a success.
And then we landed at the site of the stadium.
And then we were reunited with a rather relieved
set of Foreign Office officials and security detail!
They probably thought I'd been kidnapped for a while.
A month later, when Putin arrived in the UK for a G8 Summit,
the mood was shifting.
The West had just gone public with accusations that Assad's
forces were using chemical weapons in Syria,
and there were growing calls for military intervention.
We took Putin upstairs, to the study that had been Margaret Thatcher's
office and had Margaret Thatcher's painting on the wall.
Putin said, "Oh, truly she was an Iron Lady."
And then in this very confined space - that room's small
and we're all sort of knee-to-knee, huddled around, having this
meeting - they got down to business.
Cameron said, "If chemical weapons are used in Syria,
"and we have evidence they're beginning to be used,
"the world cannot stand by."
And Putin said, "What is this evidence?
"It's worthless.
"We haven't forgotten Iraq,
"we haven't forgotten Colin Powell at the UN."
And then there was a moment where, to me,
in the room, Putin just seemed to lose patience with all of this.
And I had a notebook in my pocket at that meeting
to record what was said.
This is actually the notebook that I noted it down, in the margin.
"In a very quiet voice."
And Putin said, "I know you're a great country with a great history.
"And you all think I'm not democratic like you.
"I won't argue with you.
"I'm an ex-KGB man, I'm wicked and scary with claws and teeth
"and you're all so well-bred and so well-educated.
"But you remember Abu Ghraib, David? Did you see those pictures?
"It was medieval, what happened there.
"To get what you want in Syria, it will have to be the same again."
At the summit the next day,
Cameron hoped his fellow leaders would help change Putin's mind.
At the G8, you had seven very like minds,
who believed in democracy and the rule of law.
And in Putin you had someone who took a different view.
It was very much seven against one, and Putin digs in more.
I was in Cornwall on a family holiday.
It's the place we go every year.
And I remember going into a little room in the house
where we were staying, where there was a television...
..and seeing the pictures, and it was just terrible.
And the sight of, you know, those little children's bodies
laid out on the floor.
It was just shocking.
And I think important to see it, not just to read about it,
but to look at the images yourself.
And I thought that the red line had been crossed,
that action should be taken.
I called President Putin.
By then it was as clear as it could be that it was a regime attack.
We were already getting the evidence.
He said, "Oh, well, it's not in the regime's interest to carry
"out a chemical weapons attack.
"It's much more in the interest of the opposition.
"We haven't seen the evidence."
And I knew he was seeing the same evidence as me.
And that was the first time I thought, "This guy's just lying,
"and will say anything." You know,
deny, deny, deny, even though it was perfectly clear what had happened.
The Prime Minister recalled Parliament
to vote on military action.
Expecting problems from the Labour opposition,
he began to canvass his own MPs.
There's quite a lot of people on my own side,
in the Conservative parliamentary party, who don't support
action against the use of chemical weapons.
I had endless meetings with Conservative MPs, saying,
"This isn't the Iraq War. This is Syria.
"This is the use of chemical weapons."
But I was struggling to convince some of my own colleagues.
Hands off Syria! Hands off Syria!
Britain had gone to war in Iraq without UN approval.
Cameron consulted his ambassador about what might be possible
this time.
I sent some advice to Downing Street
about how we could create a UN moment which would make
clear that the Russians would veto
any attempt to get authorisation through the UN Security Council
for missile strikes.
I said, "What I could do is draft a resolution
"and show it privately to the Russians on Tuesday evening,
"and get them, essentially, to set out their view on it."
And the meeting ended fairly quickly,
and I reported back to London to say that the Russians had made
clear they could not accept the resolution.
Cameron hoped he'd done enough to persuade Parliament to
vote for air strikes.
The ayes to the right - 272.
The noes to the left - 285.
Thank you. So the noes have it.
Unlock!
It was a pivotal moment for David Cameron's premiership,
and for British foreign policy, because after that, he said
to us very clearly, "We're not doing anything else
"adventurous on foreign policy that gets us into trouble with
"my people in Parliament.
"I need them for the EU referendum that's coming."
I drove down to work early in the morning.
There was very little traffic - it was lovely.
Erm, late summer day.
Early afternoon, the President spoke at the Rose Garden.
Good afternoon, everybody.
And we thought the President was going to announce the strikes.
Literally, we were standing there waiting for him
to say we've undertaken strikes.
I will seek authorisation for the use of force from the American
people's representatives in Congress.
We were left sort of open-jawed and dumbfounded.
It was not at all what we were expecting.
The atmospherics, when he's landing for the G20, were tense.
There was no formal meeting set, which is extremely
unusual for one of these meetings.
Usually, everything's crafted out ahead of time.
We had nothing on the agenda with President Putin.
And as we talked about it on the drive in the car,
it's like, "When are you going to get around to talking to Putin?"
Obama said, "We'll figure it out."
Are we ready, yeah?
As the official business got under way, one issue couldn't be avoided.
I remember very well that in that dinner,
when we were discussing Syria,
President Zuma from South Africa, or President Dilma Rousseff
from Brazil, they were opposing any kind of foreign intervention
against the Assad regime.
They were supporting the position of Putin.
And the same was coming from China or India.
Putin was capitalising on the fact that there were some threats,
but that those threats were not, er, materialising.
So it was clear, after that discussion, that the United States'
position - I would say the West's position - was isolated.
Nut Rocker
The row over dinner meant a light show Putin had
organised for his guests didn't start until 1am.
Putin was almost playing up to being this sort of new
Russian emperor. It was incredibly lavish,
this vast son et lumiere and fireworks
at this enormous palace, and it was getting colder and colder.
The Russians were sort of piling more
and more blankets onto everyone to try and stop them from freezing.
And my bilateral with Putin was set for sort of two in the morning.
And all the meetings I was in with Putin, this is probably
the most bad-tempered.
So the Prime Minister began, I think, hoping to get to
bed by saying, you know, "There's no need for us
"to rehearse all the arguments on Syria again, Vladimir."
But Putin couldn't resist sticking his thumb in the wounds.
So, I remember him saying, "Well, I'd just like you to know I'm
"very grateful to all of your Conservative backbench MPs
"who voted against you on Syria."
And so David Cameron sort of, in some sense, took the bait
and wanted some way to hit back at Putin. So he changed the subject
to LGBT rights and said,
"Well, there is something I need you to know, Vladimir."
I pitched it as, "Look, this is going to be an issue for you,
"Mr President, because you're chairing these Olympics, and you're
"going to have a lot of people very concerned about the
"approach that Russia takes." And he took this very badly.
And they got into a bicker fest,
late at night - two proud men who always like to have the last word.
I remember Putin saying, "Well, I didn't make the Russian laws,
"I just have to implement them," and Cameron saying,
"Oh, come on, Vladimir. We know that
"what you want around here is what happens around here."
Putin said, "Well, look, David, don't you know there's a demographic
"crisis in Russia? We've got an ageing population.
"We need more births, we need more babies. If I give gay rights
"and gay marriage to the Russian people,
"we'll have even fewer babies."
It was becoming increasingly clear that the relationship was no
longer a load-bearing one, it was just a pretty angry one.
Overnight, Obama was receiving troubling news from Congress.
We were getting reports about the way the votes were going.
I remember hearing this is pretty soft support,
we're going to be in trouble here.
The summit was nearly over
when he finally snatched a moment with Putin.
And Putin made this offer to cooperate with us.
"We'll help you and the international community
"get rid of chemical weapons.
"And, in return, you're not going to use force inside Syria."
The President was really intrigued by it.
There were many people inside the Obama government that wanted
to use force and thought it was necessary
and thought that, if he didn't, it would be very
bad for his credibility, because he had drawn a red line.
Putin had suddenly offered him this way out.
And it was my analysis that, if he said it to you personally,
Mr President, that he was going to make good on the deal.
Putin had seized his chance to play peacemaker
and protect his ally.
There would be no air strikes.
But Obama had secured Putin's promise that Syria's
chemical weapons would be removed and destroyed.
It's actually one of the decisions that I'm most proud of.
In part, because it...
..pushed against the conventional wisdom in this town,
and the ease with which military actions gain momentum,
the greater difficulty in pulling back
and ensuring that diplomacy is given a chance.
This surprising alliance between Putin
and Obama provided a diplomatic opportunity
to bring the Syrian government and opposition to the negotiating table.
Everybody agreed that the Americans will make sure that the
opposition will be there, and the Russians will make sure
that the Syrian government will be there.
The key goal of the negotiation was to stand up
a transition governing body.
We thought the Russians might resist that, but they didn't.
They accepted the American...
..suggestion that that be the key issue.
I warned the Americans
and the Russians that you'll be bringing your allies
kicking and screaming. They will not be coming in good faith.
It took four months for the Americans
and Russians to bring the warring parties together.
After a first round of talks ended in deadlock,
the two sides reconvened.
The Syrian opposition REALLY surprised us.
They prepared a formal proposal in writing
for Brahimi,
which said, "We came here
"to negotiate a transition governing body with full executive authority.
"We are prepared to discuss...
"..each position without preconditions,
"including the position of president."
I said, "Are you really prepared to negotiate
"that Assad stay on, at least for a time?"
And they said, "It depends what else we get in the deal."
I presented it to Ambassador Jaafari -
the head of the government delegation -
and he refused to look at it.
I started reading it, so Mr Jaafari said,
"We are not hearing a word of what he has to say.
"We are not interested in this."
So, at that moment, Mr Lakhdar Brahimi looked at him and he told
him, "Look, it's very clearly,
"you are not authorised on behalf of the regime to make any decision,
"and we cannot continue this way."
In a last-ditch attempt to save the talks,
the Americans went to see the Russians.
The whole Russian delegation was there, and it was led by
First Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov, a great big fellow.
And I remember, still, Gatilov
just looking straight at us and saying,
"No. We're not going to put pressure on the Syrian Government to
"negotiate anything." And that was the end of the negotiation.
In Syria, the situation was desperate.
Isis was now rampaging through the country,
having already captured huge swathes of Iraq.
Jihadists in eastern Syria greet the announcement of a strict
Islamic caliphate stretching across the border with Iraq
and ruled by the extremist group Isis.
How to combat Isis was top of the agenda at the next year's
UN General Assembly.
Putin, out in the cold after invading Crimea,
decided to attend for the first time in a decade.
Here, he had the world's attention.
Putin's speech made no mention of what he was about to do.
Two days later, he sent his air force into action in Syria.
We weren't expecting it. It came out of the blue.
It was a significant shock.
It was on a morning when I think we had a Security Council meeting.
So it totally blew our agenda off schedule.
We were not the only ones who were wrong-footed by this.
Foreign Minister Lavrov did not appear to be comfortable with
the situation he was in that morning.
He was irritable.
He didn't want to engage, which wasn't his style.
He was usually very happy to harangue you at length.
So to see him so rattled and ruffled was very unusual.
The impression was very clear that Lavrov had not been in this loop.
Concerned that Russia was becoming the major
player in the Middle East, David Cameron sent his new
National Security adviser to see his US counterpart, Susan Rice.
The Russian military intervention immediately solidified
Russia's defence of President Assad, and indeed
strengthened their status, if you like, in the Middle East as a whole.
When I asked whether there was likely to be a stronger
response from Washington,
she said that she didn't expect that to be the case, that the Americans
had not intervened militarily in Syria for four years,
why would they do so after the Russians had got involved
directly themselves?
The West had decided not to hold Putin back in Syria.
It was soon clear just how dangerous this could be.
It was a critical day for me because that day,
I formed the new government after the first November election.
Around 9.30, I received a call from Chief of Staff that a Russian
plane was shot down.
It was... aeroplane crossing our airspace.
This was seen as a risk by our air force.
And also, Turkish border is, at the same time, Nato border.
The, er, statements coming from Russian side was not very positive.
Russian retaliation would risk a direct conflict with Nato.
It's the first time
since the Korean War that Nato has downed a Russian plane.
I decided to convene the North Atlantic Council.
We're not normally talking about combat
engagements between a Nato ally
and Nato's largest, most militarily capable neighbour, Russia.
I said, "Look, it's the sovereign right of Turkey to
"protect its borders, including its airspace."
I was also a bit kind of - quote, unquote - "panicky"
because you never know what the Russians would do.
The Turkish ambassador explained how Turkey had warned the Russian pilot.
He shared with us an audio where actually,
we were able to hear the warning.
The Turkish controller, in Turkish-accented English, warned
repeatedly, time after time after time,
with no response from the Russian pilot.
My Central and Eastern European colleagues and Baltic colleagues,
I mean, they were applauding me...
..for shooting down the Russian airplane.
This is how you should deal with the Russians.
This is what is called position of strength in practice,
not as a concept, but in practice,
so they were kind of jubilant about it.
While Turkey was arguably right to defend its airspace,
it also launched the entire alliance on what could be a dangerous path.
My main task was to prevent that this incident
led to something that was bigger, more dangerous and risked
coming out of control.
Nato released a statement calling for calm.
The situation was defused.
Neither Turkey nor Russia had the appetite for a full-scale war.
But in the months that followed,
Russian bombing in Syria increased dramatically.
Putin's planes were not only bombing terrorists.
Civilians were also being hit.
Nowhere was this more evident than the opposition-controlled
city of Aleppo.
What was going on in Aleppo was truly shocking.
We had evidence of strikes on hospitals which had been
partially destroyed, and then Russian aircraft going
back for a second strike on the same targets.
So I had this conversation with Sergey Lavrov.
"Sergey, you are not attacking Isis.
"You're attacking schools, hospitals."
The Lavrov response was just flat denial.
"We're attacking Isis targets."
He would demand evidence, and when you presented him
evidence, he would deny it. "It's just bogus, made-up."
Lavrov's a bully and a physical intimidator.
He gets up close to you, he's a very big man and he'll just repeat
his position and snarl at you that this is the case and you're wrong.
The French President and German Chancellor confronted Putin.
Putin was very clear, very sober, very brutal,
saying, "When you look at Aleppo, there are a number of Chechen
"fighters, and I don't want these Chechen fighters to return to
"Chechnya, to my country, to destabilise Russia.
"And therefore, I'm ready to bomb all of Aleppo to make
"sure that these people don't survive."
What the Russian president said was enormous...
..not only in its brutality,
also because he went ahead bombing and destroying Aleppo.
And we see it several years later now in Ukraine.
Two years after he first ordered air strikes in Syria,
Putin was ready to declare victory.
Putin, who had long-railed against intervening on foreign soil,
had done just that.
He'd beaten the West at its own game and kept his man in power.
Russia was back with a vengeance.
Obama's red line in Syria had been effectively ignored,
and we hadn't responded.
Putin will have taken a very clear lesson from that.
And I think many of us felt privately
that he'd pulled a blinder.
Next time, Putin ramps up his aggression...
..as the West faces its greatest test in decades.
The issue for Putin was his project to rebuild the Soviet Empire.