Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin and Russia’s War Against Ukraine

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Putin goes crazy, doing worse things and aggravating the conflict with worse consequences worldwide. Important events are either alluded to indirectly, or addressed with reference to a particular theme. I read several books on Putin and Russia already last year and this book did not provide much new facts, but it is one of the few that aims to relate the past events leading to the war and it's development during the first 6-8 months.

The root cause of the Ukraine war that could have been avoided is in pro-NATO Putin's nine meetings with NATO Chief George Robertson 2001 thru 2003. We meet zealots like Alexander Dugin, a white-bearded Soviet-era intellectual who is a kind of anti-Vaclav Havel, quoting Heidegger as he rails against godless Western liberalism. As the Chapter title suggests, much is made of Putin’s distress at the fall of the Soviet Union (Matthews quotes Boris Reitschuster’s claim that the infamous ‘Moscow is silent’ moment is “the key to understanding Putin”) and its development into simmering anti-NATO resentment.Matthews titles the profile of Surkov “The Grey Cardinal”, before frowning on using that epithet for Surkov when he later insists that “the title properly belonged to Nikolai Patrushev”. The portrait of Patrushev is also helpful for introducing readers to an essential figure in Russia’s recent past, the current war, and possibly the future too. Who were the dogs fighting under the carpet – as Churchill memorably once described Kremlin infighting – who battled for Putin’s ear, heart and mind? The most interesting parts of the book are the individual stories of various people involved in both sides of the conflict from Ukrainian refugees and soldiers to the Russian conscripts. We drop in everywhere from Putin’s long white table to Zelensky’s bunker, via the siege of Kyiv and the trenches of Mariupol.

This is told at pace and with a clarity that gives the reasons for the invasion and how those decisions were made, and indeed influenced by others such as the US, NATO, the EU and former Eastern block nations, either by their approach and language to Russia, or in [many] perceived slights and invented snubs. Chapter 1 (“Poisoned Roots”) is necessarily concise and touches lightly, if at all, on many of the controversies of early Russian and Ukrainian history, but Matthews does a good job emphasising the fundamental uncertainty of key issues. Thinking with the Blood, ( Newsweek, 2014), a personal reportage based on a journey across war-torn Ukraine in the late summer of 2014, was published as an ebook. Civil war broke on Russia like a thunderstorm, replacing weeks of mounting political heat with a deluge of fire and fury.Russians, he points out, are long used to hardship, so despite the misery caused by sanctions and mobilisation, things would have to get “far, far worse” for any anti-Putin uprising. His inner clique, it seems, knew the war would isolate Moscow internationally, but figured it was still worth it. He also gives a detailed account of many of the idealogues that introduced Putin to Russian Ultranationalism and Fascism, in addition to figures in his inner circle.

Yet in a war already extensively reported from the Ukrainian side, it is Matthews’s take from Russia that may jolt readers the most. But nonetheless it is a democracy where an apparently invincible strongman can – in theory at least – be deposed after two decades in power by the will of the electorate. Drawing on over 25 years’ experience as a correspondent in Moscow, as well as his own family ties to Russia and Ukraine, journalist Owen Matthews takes us through the poisoned historical roots of the conflict, into the Covid bubble where Putin conceived his invasion plans in a fog of paranoia about Western threats, and finally into the inner circle around Ukrainian president and unexpected war hero Volodimir Zelensky. For the moment Ingermanlandia is better known as Russia’s Leningrad Region, and its capital as St Petersburg. To Putin, it was the single betrayal that brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union, depriving the old empire of one of its most industrialised zones.Overreach was shortlisted for the Parliamentary Books of the Year prize, [28] the Pushkin House Book Prize 2023 [29] and was also named one of The Daily Telegraph's Books of the Year.