Owen Matthews Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s War Against Ukraine (Mudlark, London, 2022, 414 pp)
Samuel Ramani Putin’s War on Ukraine: Russia’s Campaign for Global Counter-Revolution (Hurst and Company, London, 2023, 584 pp)
Serhii Plokhy The Russo-Ukrainian War (Allen Lane Penguin Random House, UK, 2023, xxii + 376 pp, four maps)
Vladimir Putin’s attempt to conquer Ukraine has been a dismal failure. Even his criminal acolyte and mercenary commander Yevgeny Prigozhin now speaks of possible revolution in Russia. But the war has stirred up every kind of confusion, anxiety and polemic in twitterdom and global geopolitics. Authoritative, book length accounts have been sorely needed. These three books all meet that criterion.
The best of them is Serhii Plokhy’s. It is required reading for anyone who wishes to have an informed and well-founded opinion on the subject. The other two, while competent and useful, fall far short of its depth and lucidity. It includes four illuminating maps, where the others have none. They are, by comparison, breathless and anecdotal. He is magisterial.
I don’t suggest that the other two not be read. Only that Plokhy’s must be. Matthews, as he informs us, spent 27 years reporting from and on Russia and has family lineage, on his mother’s side, going back centuries in the service of the Russian Tsars, though born in cities which were all part of the Ukraine that Putin has sought to dismember and subdue since 2004 and especially since 2014: Kharkiv, Simferopol, Poltava. His book is deeply felt and very well informed.
Samuel Ramani teaches Politics and International Relations at Oxford University, is an associate fellow of the Royal United Services Institute and a regular contributor to major media, including the BBC, Al Jazeera and CNN. His book is massively, even excessively documented, with a staggering 123 pages of endnotes and an index running to fifty pages – Plokhy’s has sixteen. The mass of detail and its global roaming too often leaves the reader groping to find the ‘wood’ among the countless ‘trees’.
Plokhy, a Ukrainian scholar, has been Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of History at Harvard University since 2007. He is a prolific author on the history of Russia, Ukraine, the Soviet Union, the Cold War, nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. His books include The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (2015), Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy (2019) and Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (2021). This latest book, written between February 2022 and March 2023, draws upon the full range of his knowledge and concerns. It is a masterpiece.
The outbreak of the war caught him, he tells us, in Vienna, where he was doing research in the archives of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Like almost everyone, including President Zelensky in Kyiv and political leaders in Western Europe, he had clung to the hope that Putin’s threats of war were a bluff. When the war began, his immediate hope was that it would be a limited attempt to consolidate Russian conquest of the Donbas. He soon realized his error. Within a fortnight or so, besieged by requests for comments, he put aside other projects to write a systematic book on the subject.
The language that he uses to describe this step is moving and resonant:
How did all this happen? Neither emotionally nor professionally was I ready to think through and explain to myself and others what was going on…But…I realized that, as a historian I could offer something that others lacked when it came to understanding the largest military conflict in Europe since World War II. Eventually I convinced myself that, to rephrase Winston Churchill, historians are the worst interpreters of current events except everyone else.
He proceeds, then, to provide what is, by an appreciable margin, the best account of the roots, logic, battlefield progress and geopolitical ramifications of the conflict. He does so with impressive economy, lucidity and analytical insight. Given that the war is still going and that the matter is immensely complex, his achievement is stunning.
His Preface, ‘Making Sense of War’ and his Afterword ‘The New World Order’ are, alike, incisive and judicious. The core of the book consists of thirteen chapters. They could hardly have been better scripted or edited. The first four, ‘Imperial Collapse’, ‘Democracy and Autocracy’, ‘Nuclear Implosion’ and ‘The New Eastern Europe’ set the scene. The following four, ‘The Crimean Gambit’, ‘The Rise and Fall of the New Russia’, ‘Putin’s War’ and ‘The Gates of Kyiv’ take us through the road to war and Putin’s shambolic leadership of a war he had sole responsibility for starting.
The following three, ‘Eastern Front’, ‘The Black Sea’ and ‘The Counteroffensive’ narrate the progress of the war, between late March 2022 and September through December 2022, as Ukraine staunchly resisted the invasion, mobilized and, having checked the Russian invasion, hit back and recovered a good deal of territory, not least Kharkiv, in the northeast and Kherson, in the southeast. The combination of his use of maps and his exceptionally clear account of the fighting makes these chapters invaluable. Nothing in Matthews or Ramani comes close.
His final two chapters, ‘The Return of the West’ and ‘The Pivot to Asia’ achieve with crispness and sound judgement what Ramani leaves in a welter of data points and Matthews was writing too early to see: a net assessment of the global implications of the war. His central conclusion is that Putin has made a complete hash of the Russian imperial project and triggered all the things he thought he could sweep away: Western strategic cohesion, the expansion of NATO on his borders and the consolidation of Ukrainian nationalism as never before. In short, Putin has failed abysmally. Read and learn.
Paul Monk is a fellow of the Institute for Law and Strategy (London and New York) and the author of a dozen books. A second, updated edition of his classic Thunder From the Silent Zone: Rethinking China has just been published, with a cover design by Chinese dissident and artist Badiucao.