A wave of hurriedly written books about the Russo-Ukrainian war is about to crash over our bookshops and overburdened shelves, but it is hard not to feel sorry for most of their authors. Owen Matthews has already come out with what is not only one of the fastest, but also likely to be the best, setting a painfully high benchmark for those who follow.

He remained convinced that belief was the only gravity that could hold his contradictory world of duty and lies together. But he was no longer sure he had preserved enough of it to make the center hold.” A respected journalist draws on deep knowledge to explain the thinking behind Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. 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.

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”. 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. Moscou Babylone (Les Escales, 2013), a novel based on Matthews' experiences in Moscow in the 1990s, has been published in French, [20] German [21] and Czech. It was chosen as the 'coup de coeur etranger' (favourite foreign book) at the 2013 Nancy Literary Festival, Le Livre sur la Place. [22] 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.”

A good, well written book. My only reservation is this: if you are interested in Ukraine, read a decent paper each day and maybe listen to or watch programmes or Podcasts about the Russian invasion, almost all of the content will be broadly familiar to you. So claims that it is "astonishing" or in some way revelatory are overdone. After a year of the conflict, the world wonders how the second best army in Ukraine (the Russian) is doing. And it is that the Russians are fighting a 20th century war in the 21st century. NATO is providing kyiv with modern weapons and although they are not tanks or planes, they are missiles capable of destroying tanks and planes. Owen Matthews | The Orwell Foundation". www.orwellfoundation.com. 17 October 2010 . Retrieved 24 May 2023.As we near the first anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine the inevitable flood of books begin in earnest. Of this first draft of history Owen Matthews contribution stands head and shoulders above the rest.