Drawing on the history of his mother, a Russian-speaker from Kharkhiv, and his Crimean-born grandfather (whose stories he has told in his best-selling book “Stalin's Children”) Matthews’ personal perspective resonates throughout the book. The author details the development of Russian nationalist attitudes from the fall of the Soviet Union and up the invasion. 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. The portraits painted of figures such as Nikolai Patruschev are in particular quite chilling, being if anything more steeped in paranoia and conspiracy theory thinking. Patruschev is also thought to have been behind the planning and execution of both the Litvinenko assassination and the attempted assassinations of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. The use of second-hand sources, though, is the only way to provide a proper overview: in a war this big, no reporter can be everywhere. And besides, much of this book’s value is in exploring the war’s deeper roots.

Matthews, Owen (11 October 2022). Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin's War Against Ukraine. Mudlark Press. ISBN 9780008562748.

When observing a war from a far the tendency to view things in terms of battles and grand strategies sets in and the stories of suffering and heroism on the ground can often be lost in the fog of war. 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”.

An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin's Master Agent (Bloomsbury, 2019) [25] A biography of German Communist spy Richard Sorge, the first English language work written with extensive access to the Soviet archives. Chosen as a Book of the Year by The Economist magazine: "A tragic, heroic story, magnificently told with an understated rage." [26] An astonishing investigation into the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war – from the corridors of the Kremlin to the trenches of Mariupol.The title refers to Putin’s hubris in launching the Ukraine invasion, yet this book is much more, charting how the dream of reclaiming Moscow’s old empire went from “the marginal fringes of Russian politics to become official Kremlin policy”. Owen Matthews (born December 1971) is a British writer, historian and journalist. His first book, Stalin's Children, was shortlisted for the 2008 Guardian First Book Award, [1] the Orwell Prize for political writing, [2] and France's Prix Médicis Etranger. [3] His books have been translated into 28 languages. He is a former Moscow and Istanbul Bureau Chief for Newsweek. True, this is not a classic war reporter’s tale of frontline action. Some of Matthews’s accounts of key battles, for example, are not first-hand but recreated through interviews and cuttings. In recounting how Kremlin troops were woefully ill-prepared, for example, he draws on testimony to a Ukrainian war crimes court by a young Russian squaddie who pleaded guilty to shooting a civilian after his armoured convoy was ambushed. 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. By mid-March, even Matthews himself has to leave for a while, fearing that his 19-year-old son, a Russian passport holder, may get drafted. Yet amidst this chaos and personal upheaval, he has produced a book that is not merely the first full account of the war, but may set the standard for some time to come.