Putin's Witnesses

Vitaly Mansky's documentary Putin's Witnesses begins on December 31, 1999, the day Boris Yeltsin resigned as president of Russia and named Vladimir Putin acting head of state. At the time, Mansky worked for a state television channel and had unusual access to Yeltsin, Putin and the circles around them. He and his cameraman filmed over the following year, recording Putin's path from a little-known prime minister to an elected president, alongside figures such as Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Nemtsov. Mansky made the film years later, after leaving Russia, drawing on his own archive to reconsider that period from outside the country.

The film is the first documentary Mansky directed among the two listed for him, followed by Time to the Target in 2026. He wrote the screenplay, with Filip Remunda, Vít Klusák and Natalia Manskaya producing. The credited cast numbers twenty-one, with Putin, Yeltsin, Gorbachev and Naina Yeltsina appearing through archive material and Mansky himself narrating. It runs 103 minutes and was made as a co-production involving Germany, Latvia, the Czech Republic and Switzerland.

On IMDb, the film holds a rating of 7 out of 10 from around 1,600 votes, while on TMDB it has a rating of 6.3 out of 10 from a much smaller number of votes.