The war in Transnistria

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. We hear from a Cypriot lawyer, imprisoned by the British for almost two years during the "Cyprus Emergency” of 1955-1959. Our guest, Professor Rebecca Bryant, explains how this ...  Show more

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is media, culture and creative industries lecturer Sarah Jilani. We start in 1954 with the Japanese film Seven Samurai which is widely considered to be one of world ci ...  Show more

With speculation mounting that President Putin might mount an attack on Moldova, we're going back to the early 1990s and a war between the Moldovans and Russian-backed separatists in the disputed region of Transnistria. Several hundred people died in a conflict which ended in a s ...  Show more

When Vladimir Putin was appointed prime minister in August 1999, he was a political unknown. He quickly made his name by ordering Russian Federation forces to re-take control of the breakaway republic of Chechnya, which just years earlier had fought and won autonomy from Moscow. ...  Show more

Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine on 24th February 2022, but how did we get to this point? After the brutality of the Second World War, Ukraine was completely under the control of Moscow. Then in the 1980s, with Chernobyl as the catalyst, the Ukrainian nationalist movement regained ...  Show more

The Cold War was defined by the antagonism between two world superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. They relied on proxy wars, espionage, disinformation, assassinations and sabotage to undermine one another as part of a greater ideological battle between Western ...