Owen Matthews' Overreach

"We used to believe the Russians had the second-best army in the world. Now we know they have the second-best army in the Ukraine."

-Ukrainian soldiers' joke

A bit of bravado, funny, but not entirely wrong either...

Owen Matthews' book on the war in the Ukraine came out late last year. Matthews is a British journalist with deep ties to Russia: he lived there for twenty-five years, speaks the language fluently, was the Moscow bureau chief for Newsweek.

Also his mother, wife, and children are Russian. 

He starts with a quick history of the Ukraine. A lot of his information comes from Serhii Plokhy's The Gates of Europe, but some of it is also family history: his mother was born Lyudmila Bibikov, a Russian-speaker from the Ukraine; his grandfather Bibikov was an ardent communist (Matthews has an Aunt Lenina!) but his grandfather had the temerity to suggest that collectivization was proceeding too fast in the Ukraine; and so he was murdered in the Stalinist purges in the 30s. Matthews' grandmother was exiled to Siberia. Earlier Bibikovs were high-ranking military officers in the Tsarist army. "For two centuries the Bibikovs played a significant role in Russia's imperial rule over Ukraine, first as servants of the tsars and later as loyal lieutenants of the Soviet power." He goes on, "The connection is not a comfortable one."

But the earliest Bibikov in the historical record was born Bibik Beg, a Tatar warlord who swore fealty to the Russian tsar in 1486 and Russified his name to Bibikov.

This was all pretty fascinating and well-done, and I noticed one of Matthews' earlier books is a family memoir, which I'm now curious to find.

Then comes the lead up to the war. Matthews gives a coherent account of the different factions in Russian government. Matthews clearly has good sources in both the Foreign Affairs department under Sergey Lavrov and in the office of Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman. (Neither of his sources he names, for obvious reasons.) Putin was not necessarily the most aggressive (and Sergey Shoigu probably the least) but Putin had become isolated during Covid and no longer quite tethered to reality. (Why was he so isolated? There's apparently a rumour he had thyroid cancer, but nobody knows for sure.) This was interesting, but complicated.

Russia invades on February 24th of last year. Matthews is in Moscow and notes how quickly the mood in Moscow changed. Before the war he was able to talk relatively freely with friends and sources; after it starts he's shunned. At the end of March a friend tells him in strong terms he needs to get his son out: his son is 19 and not in university (he's working with a theatre troupe) and so is subject to call-up. Sanctions have started to bite and flights out of Russia are limited; they get to Istanbul on Turkish Air. Ticket prices have gone through the roof, but Turkish Air is still accepting frequent flyer miles. One advantage of being an international journalist, I guess, is you got lots of those... 😉

Everybody expected the Russian army to roll into Kyiv, not just Putin and Russian generals, but also most of the West. Early on Zelenskyy was prepared to negotiate with Putin, to offer neutrality, to stay of NATO, possibly to give up territory. But Putin believed he could get more. After the discovery of the atrocities at Bucha and Irpin north of Kyiv, Zelenskyy's willingness, but also room, to negotiate shrank.

Of course the Ukraine did fight, and with considerable success. In retrospect, Matthews notes how much military experience there was in the Ukrainian army and even in the general Ukrainian public by then, after eight years of an active war zone in the Donbas: 900,000 Ukrainians had done military service but were not in the army at the start of the war. And they were willing to fight. At the beginning, the Ukraine had more volunteers than weapons, and turned people away.

The Russians less so. It seems nearly a million people left Russia in the first month or so after the war started; possibly another million after the ramp-up in conscription in September of 2022. Putin still remains popular though, and the exodus may have only strengthened his popularity. Matthews discusses such independent polling as is available; it confirms Putin remains relatively popular with the average Russian.

He also notes those Russians who do not like him may be even more nationalistic; much of Putin's opposition is from the nationalistic right-wing. In the end Matthews isn't very optimistic about how all this turns out. The sanctions have hurt Russia, but not hurt enough to be a game changer. Putin probably won't fall, but should he fall, he's more likely to be replaced with somebody worse.

Matthews quotes Andrei Kolesnikov of the Moscow Carnegie Center, "...and so we continue our steady movement down the world's garbage chute."

Matthews closing:

"Not only would Putin leave no lasting ideological legacy, but any legacy of prosperity and stability that he may have created had been destroyed by his own decision ot make war on Ukraine. He had gained a fifth of Ukraine [less now--me] and increased the size of Russia by half a per cent. The price of his illusions was not only thousands of lost lives, but also a lost future for Russia. Most ominously of all, the misbegotten war had opened a Pandora's box of alternative futures for Russia that were much more scary than Putin's regime had ever been."

This could do for either Russia or Ukraine for my reading challenge, but I have another Andrey Kurkov novel out from the library that I should read soon, so that will be Ukraine and this will cover Russia. 

It was a pretty good look at an unfortunate topic.