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

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To survive and be happy, Russians have so much to bury, to willfully ignore. Small wonder that the intensity of their pleasures and indulgences is so sharp; it has to match the quality of their suffering.” His inner clique, it seems, knew the war would isolate Moscow internationally, but figured it was still worth it. By turning Russia into somewhere that no liberal wanted to live, they could ensure power passed to their own children, many of whom already hold top government jobs. A country where millions died in socialism’s name now resembles the hereditary Tsarist aristocracy before it. MiG-29 ให้กองทัพอากาศยูเครน แต่ในเวลาต่อมาการเดินเกมการทูตแบบส่วนตัวของ หวังอี้ รัฐมนตรีต่างประเทศของจีน กับนาโต้และอเมริกาส่งผลให้จุดยืนเกี่ยวกับรัสเซียและสงครามครั้งนี้ขยับเข้ามาชิดกันมาก จนสีจิ้นผิงประกาศว่าโลกต้อง “ป้องกันไม่ให้เกิดวิกฤตินิวเคลียร์ในทวีปยูเรเซีย” ระหว่างเจอไบเดนในการประชุม G20 ที่บาหลี Matthews, Owen (11 October 2022). Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin's War Against Ukraine. Mudlark Press. ISBN 9780008562748. A respected journalist draws on deep knowledge to explain the thinking behind Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Thus did Putin fall in with the Orthodox Church-influenced Far Right, who see Mother Russia as the last bastion of traditional Christian values. 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. And we tune into religious broadcasting like Tsargrad TV – Orthodoxy’s answer to Fox News – where moral rot is blamed on gays and human rights busybodies funded by George Soros. The invasion, says Matthews, was “the final triumph of an elderly Russia over a young one, of paranoid Soviet-minded conspiracy theorists over... post-Soviet practical capitalists.”The world is on their side,” one old friend tells Matthews while doom-scrolling the news at her barstool. “But Russians? Everyone hates Russians. Even most Russians hate people like us, who are against the regime.” Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of Russian America (Bloomsbury 2013), a history of Imperial Russia's doomed attempt to colonise America, was shortlisted for the 2014 Pushkin House Prize [15] for books on Russia. [16] [17] [18] [19] Putin is totally weakened: perhaps it would be the best result for the West, the bad thing is that Russia is leaving more and more of the international concert and this is bad for the world in general and especially for the Russians. Matthews’s analysis of why the invasion has foundered also offers insights. He challenges, for example, the notion of Kyiv’s armed forces as outnumbered amateurs, pointing out that during the last eight years of the simmering Donbas conflict, some 900,000 Ukrainians have served, “making a vast reserve force with recent combat experience”.

It paints Putin (and rightly so IMO) as a power-hungry, war mongering dictator hellbent on destroying not only Ukraine but his own country as well to restore the USSR. An astonishing investigation into the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war – from the corridors of the Kremlin to the trenches of Mariupol. Written at what must have been hypersonic speed, Overreach is a remarkable achievement, with Matthews’s expert eye like an all-seeing drone buzzing from one side of the conflict to the other. We drop in everywhere from Putin’s long white table to Zelensky’s bunker, via the siege of Kyiv and the trenches of Mariupol. Matthews, Owen (28 August 2008). "Stalin's Children by Owen Matthews". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 24 May 2023.Matthews co-wrote the 2015 Russian television series Londongrad and played an episodic role in it. [32] Matthews also played the US Ambassador to Moscow in the 2017 Russian television series The Optimists. [33]

Yet in a war already extensively reported from the Ukrainian side, it is Matthews’s take from Russia that may jolt readers the most. 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.That is the result of Putin's war. When the war with Ukraine began, Western countries decided not to help Kiev, they thought that in less than a week the Russians would take full control of the country. What could Ukraine do against the second best army in the world?