3. Russia goes its own way

Tristan Redman is joined by Gabriel Gatehouse, an investigative journalist and former international editor of BBC Newsnight, and Luke Harding, the Guardian's senior international correspondent, to trace the decade in which Russia moved from a brief partnership with the West to open confrontation with it.

They begin in the immediate aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks, when Vladimir Putin was among the first world leaders to offer support to the United States, and Russian and American forces cooperated over Afghanistan. They discuss how that cooperation gave way, within two years, to Russian opposition at the United Nations to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, an invasion carried out without Security Council authorisation.

They also discuss the near-fatal poisoning of Ukrainian opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko during the 2004 presidential election, the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006, and Vladimir Putin's speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, in which he rejected the idea of a unipolar, US-led world order.

The episode concludes with Russia's invasion of Georgia in August 2008, an operation carried out on the pretext of protecting Russian citizens and peacekeepers in South Ossetia.

A BBC News Long Form Audio production

Presenter: Tristan Redman
Producers: Keiligh Baker and Nik Sindle
Sound engineers: Neil Churchill, Gareth Jones and Michael Regaard
Production co-ordinators: Sophie Hill and Katie Morrison
Editor: Matt Willis
Radio 4 commissioners: Daniel Clarke and Hugh Levinson