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

"This is a remarkable book. Owen Matthews is a very experienced journalist with a quarter of a century history of working as the Moscow correspondent of various world media. He’s well-known to the Russia-watching community and he has written a number of books. In my personal opinion, this book has the best possible title: Overreach . It’s one of those cases where a word is spot on. It symbolizes the whole complex thing in just one word. I remember reading an academic article that started with the phrase ‘this misbegotten war.’ This epithet struck me as so fitting. It’s very Shakespearean, but it also describes what this was. It’s the same with Overreach . You have a nice little plan which you’re sure will succeed. You have done the same thing before, and it went fine. Then you do it again, but on a larger scale, and everything collapses around your ears. You have overplayed your hand. Both for this book and the other book about the war on the shortlist— Russia’s War by Jade McGlynn—there is a self-evident problem. Events are unfolding before our very eyes. The public is expecting answers, prognoses, prophecies, answers. There’s a demand which is being answered, but it is a difficult and risky thing to write something so final as a book. A book is a body, a world in itself. After the last word you have written, you put a full stop and your cozy little universe is complete. But the very un-cozy, big universe around you and your book continues to develop. There’s that story about Zhou Enlai, when he was asked about the consequences of the French Revolution, and he said it was too early to tell. It is much too early to tell anything about this war. And yet people write books, which is a very brave thing to do. What’s good about Matthews’s book is that because he’s a journalist he’s used to describing processes which are ongoing. Journalists tell stories which are developing. He does not provide answers. He’s not finalizing anything in the book. It’s more of an attempt to describe than to analyze. But it is analytical in the sense that it focuses on propaganda efforts, which again, being a journalist, he is good at doing. He’s dissecting the Russian misinformation machine, the propaganda machine which has managed to both lay the groundwork and mislead its own leadership into embarking on this misbegotten war. That is what makes this book so interesting. It’s humble. It does not present the author as knowing all the answers, which is also true about Jade McGlynn’s book. He’s trying to do what I, as a political scientist, would call dissecting the decision-making process. It’s not exactly getting into somebody’s head: that evidently is impossible. He’s describing the Russian decision-making system in general, the political machine or the black box, as David Easton called it, which processes demands and makes them into political decisions. He is using his experience as a journalist, including his insider knowledge and his connections with people in Russia who tell him things. He focuses specifically on the propaganda machine and the informational sphere, which I think is quite valuable."