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Russia-Ukraine War – Putin’s Mistakes – Owen Matthews
267 Plays1 year ago
Ep 040 – Nonfiction. The Russia-Ukraine War is the most serious crisis in Europe since World War II. At the heart of the conflict is a mystery: why did Putin put his entire regime at risk of destruction? Owen Matthews joins me to discuss his new book, "Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s War Against Ukraine."
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Transcript
Context of Putin's Statement on Soviet Union
00:00:00
Speaker
The one quote that everybody knows from Vladimir Putin is what he told the federal assemblies in November 2005, quote, the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. That's the quote that everyone knows. However, people forget the first half of that sentence.
00:00:23
Speaker
Because what Putin actually said was, for the millions of Russians who found themselves trapped outside the borders of their homeland, comma, the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. I mean, that's a really important difference. It's really important because he's talking about those Russians, those poor Russians that he kind of
00:00:47
Speaker
as the savior of Russians and the uniter of the Slavic peoples. It is now his mission to save them.
Introduction of Host and Guest
00:01:03
Speaker
Hi, everyone. This is AJ Woodhams, host of the War Books Podcast, where I interview today's best authors writing about war-related topics.
Owen Matthews on Putin's War and Book 'Overreach'
00:01:16
Speaker
Today, I am really excited to have on the show Owen Matthews for his latest book, Overreach, the inside story of Putin's war against Ukraine.
00:01:25
Speaker
Owen is an award-winning correspondent, historian, and fluent Russian speaker. He has lived and worked in Moscow for over 25 years. He has built up an unrivaled network of contacts who have worked in Putin's administration, security services, armed forces, and propaganda machine, and worked first as a staffer for the Moscow Times, and then as Newsweek Magazine's Moscow bureau chief.
00:01:48
Speaker
He currently contributes regularly to foreign policy, spectator, daily mail, telegraph, and the critic. His book, Overreach, which we're talking about today, won the Pushkin House Book Prize, was a telegraph book of the year, and it was shortlisted for the parliamentary book awards. Owen, how are you doing today? Hi, very well. Thanks for having me on, Adrian. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for joining me.
00:02:11
Speaker
And I really love having people who are writing about Russia, Ukraine on this show. We've had a few others, we were talking, I had Serhi Plohy on, Mark Galliati was on, Christopher Miller, lots of other people who are writing about the war. And I'm always so grateful for them to come on. So thank you for talking about this very urgent and relevant topic right now.
Kremlin's Perspective on Russia-Ukraine War
00:02:38
Speaker
One of the first questions I like to ask people when they come on the show and talk about their book is in your own words, what is your book about? It's about the beginning of the origins and the first year of the Russian Ukraine war. But I guess the unique selling point, the thing that I tried to concentrate on was the origins of the war in terms of
00:03:03
Speaker
what happened in the Kremlin and what happened in Vladimir Putin's circle and to the extent that we can know it what happens inside Vladimir Putin's head because there have been lots of and there will be even more lots of fantastic books
00:03:21
Speaker
about the war, written from the Ukrainian side with lots of great reportage and so on. But for me, when I conceived this book, it was pitched in... I put together the book proposal in the first month of the war in March.
00:03:37
Speaker
of 22. And what I realized was that there's going to be lots of books about the progress of the war. But in many ways, Ukraine is not really the story of the origins of the war. Ukraine is sort of weirdly peripheral to why this happened. It's really a Moscow story. It's a tale of a particular
00:04:01
Speaker
confluence of circumstances, of paranoia, of misinformation, of delusions, of opportunism and personal politics. And all of those things happen in the Kremlin and in Moscow. So the intent of the book was really to explain why the war happened. I worked in Russia for 25, well, for about half of the 25 years that I worked for Newsweek, I was in Russia.
00:04:30
Speaker
as Moscow correspondent and as Moscow bureau chief. And until the outbreak of the war, I used to go at least every month or every couple of months to Moscow for work purposes, basically. And after the war broke out, I went three times. Most lately, my last trip ended in October of
Matthews' Network and Insights into Kremlin
00:04:56
Speaker
22, so I have not been back for a year.
00:04:58
Speaker
But until that point, I was going back very regularly. And so what was it that made you think, I got to write this book? I have to let people know I've got to get this out. What was it that sparked this book for you? Well, I realized that actually, by dint of seniority, in other words, by just having been in Russia for a very long time, I actually found myself knowing a lot of
00:05:26
Speaker
people who, as the Russians say, are so that they are certainly not in the inner circle of Kremlin power. But through various journalistic work, I had quite a large network of, you know, I would say second rank people, by which I mean sort of
00:05:51
Speaker
heads of Duma committees, you know, regional governors, heads of...
00:06:00
Speaker
members of the upper house of the Russian parliament's foreign policy and security committees.
Challenges of Reporting on Russia-Ukraine Conflict
00:06:10
Speaker
I knew quite a lot of soldiers from Chechnya who had now become general officers. I found myself sort of curiously well connected among Moscow media executives and so on and so forth.
00:06:25
Speaker
I'm not boasting, this is basically what happens to every foreign correspondent when you spend literally a quarter of a century reporting on a country, your contacts kind of suddenly, you know, all kind of become senior and interesting. So I realized that I did have a certain amount of critical mass of people who I could talk to about sort of what actually happened. And I also realized that
00:06:54
Speaker
there were going to be a lot of analytical books. In fact, I quite often get asked to review them, and including for the London Review of Books, I got a gigantic box of Russia books. It's like every year produces a box of Russian books. But I thought,
00:07:17
Speaker
that, and they're mostly fantastically boring, I won't mention many names, but like, you know, there's a lot of very turgid sort of international relations style writing that's being done about Russia and it's not very digestible, it's not very relatable. So, because I studied history at university and I've written several history books,
00:07:41
Speaker
I decided to actually take to do two things that you don't necessarily always conventionally get in these kind of political books and that was to add a journalistic element which was my own reporting and other people's reporting about in a series of individuals who illustrate the various different points of the story and also a historical introduction because actually
00:08:08
Speaker
the poisoned root of this conflict is actually history. And that sort of violent shared history is not just context. It's actually sort of vital to understanding of the understanding of this conflict. So it's not just a politics book. It's not just a journalistic book. And it's not just a history book. It's a little bit of a mix of all three. Yeah. And talking about your reporting,
00:08:36
Speaker
you write about how when the war broke out, you had a very tough time getting people to speak to you, even friends in Russia. Talk about, describe that. What was it like to be a reporter in Russia trying to get information about this war and what was going on?
Pre-War Disbelief and Miscalculations
00:08:55
Speaker
Well, the curious thing was basically nobody that I knew, I was in Moscow just before the war broke out and
00:09:04
Speaker
and just immediately after it broke out. Before the war broke out, I spent New Years and January and so on in Russia. And obviously there was a lot of tension and build up and diplomacy and so on. Pretty much nobody that I knew in Russia in terms of contacts or friends had any idea or no one believed that there was actually gonna be a war.
00:09:33
Speaker
Basically, the better informed the contact, the more adamant they were that the heavy metal diplomacy, that the heavy metal was the bluff and the diplomacy was the real play. Literally, everybody thought that, from the heads of government channels to people who were close to Sergei Lavrov, foreign ministry people, to government people, people who had been the sort of former ministers and so on.
00:10:02
Speaker
the complete consensus of informed opinion in Russia was that it's not going to happen. And then suddenly, bam, it happens. So everyone is completely thrown for a loop by this. That's so interesting because in Ukraine, it's the same situation that you write about. The president doesn't believe, President Zelensky doesn't believe inundation is going to happen. A lot of his inner circle also doesn't believe that's going to happen.
00:10:28
Speaker
So it's interesting that both sides, with the exception of Putin in his very close circle, nobody actually thought that this war was going to happen. I mean, there's a small qualification to that.
00:10:43
Speaker
Quite a lot of people believed that there was going to be a limited offensive, that Putin was going to go and at least occupy the rebel republics of the Donbas. But literally nobody anticipated that they were going to do a full-scale invasion and go for Kiev. I mean, that was a really very well-kept secret. But just to answer your original question, the Kremlin's actions just threw everybody for a loop.
00:11:11
Speaker
And in the first weeks of the war, there was a lot of, the Russians were very gung-ho about taking Kiev in three days, then it was a week. But the effect of this very sudden and violent move on the Kremlin's part on the Russian elite was to suddenly signal that the old rules were broken
00:11:41
Speaker
you know, the old rules of what you could say, who you could talk to, and the new rules were not yet clear, not yet written. You know, we found ourselves suddenly and abruptly in a world where the Kremlin could suddenly do something as crazy and unexpected as suddenly the manifold scale evasion of Ukraine. And that has all kinds of ramifications in the minds of people whose lives and livelihoods and careers and so on are intimately linked to there.
00:12:11
Speaker
good relations with the Kremlin. That led to questions, you know, what else are they going to do? Are we going back to some kind of Stalinist or Brezhnev era rules of the foreigners are dangerous, you can't talk to foreigners and so on. So just, you know, you asked about how that works as a reporter. People, contacts just sort of for a period got extremely nervous about
00:12:41
Speaker
talking to foreigners and they, and I had to get quite devious actually. I mean, I ended up, well, it's not exactly rocket science, but I would basically like get mutual friends to like, you know, invite that person who, you know, to give an example. I was calling mutual friends like, can you invite this guy, General X, and me and we're just like,
00:13:06
Speaker
you know meet at the dacha and you know we'll have a like a sort of you know we'll get drunk and you know then we can have a sort of little chat you know. Without the other person knowing that you were going to be there. Well yeah exactly I mean but on the other hand you know he does know that I'm a journalist and you know but you know when you're there around the table it's not an interview it's a social and the corollary of that so there were lots of permutations of that kind of thing like sort of meeting people socially and going to dinners and
00:13:35
Speaker
and getting other people to connect us in a social way. So, you know, there's, and that was very good for all kinds of, you know, gossip and tidbits and so on. However, there's a major problem with that journalistically. And that is, as you're probably aware, I mean, when you're, you know, in order to quote someone on the record, you have to identify yourself as a journalist.
00:13:58
Speaker
you have to ask them for their permission that their comments are on the record. If you're just talking to somebody in a social situation, then that's essentially pretty much by definition in a non-attributable. People don't really know the difference between background and off the record and so on. But regardless of all of those sort of journalistic niceties, the upshot of it is,
00:14:24
Speaker
that there's lots of, there's far more anonymous sources than I would really like and I'm very, than I'm comfortable with. And unfortunately, I, I mean, we, you know, the reader's just gonna have to live with that. No way around it. I just made all those people up. I mean, well, I, you know, that happens, I didn't, but you know, it's, it's, it's always an uncomfortable thing to have to ask the readers to trust you on anything. And American,
00:14:53
Speaker
newspapers and magazines. I work for the American press for most of my career, 25 years at Newsweek, and American newspapers and magazines are justifiably very nervous about anonymous sources. Because not really for the reason because they think the journalists make them up. That very rarely happens that journalists just invent stuff.
00:15:20
Speaker
The major problem with anonymous sources is when someone is not answering for their own words, then it's much easier for them to mislead you. That's really the reason why it's a difficult thing to anonymize sources. Anyway, but the atmosphere in Moscow was very strange. It was one of nervousness about whether mass repression was going to begin, because actually it didn't really begin. There was no
00:15:48
Speaker
immediate mass repression inside Russia in the first weeks of the war. But there were, everyone was extremely nervous about things, extraordinary things that might happen. The war already an extraordinary thing happened. Could another extraordinary thing like a general mobilization happen? Well, possibly. Could the closing the borders happen? Well, possibly. So in that kind of
00:16:14
Speaker
in that kind of, suddenly this, as the Russians say, the war sort of broke like a thunderbolt, otherwise it's an unsuspecting bourgeois life of Moscow.
00:16:29
Speaker
Yeah, well, before we dive into some of the content in your book, just a bit about your background, because not only professionally did you work in and cover Russia, but you actually have family connections in Russia.
Historical Russia-Ukraine Relations
00:16:48
Speaker
What are your family ties to Russia? Well, I spent my whole life telling people that my mother's a Russian from Kharkov.
00:16:59
Speaker
But in fact, that's become an extremely politically incorrect thing to say, because when my mother, who's still with us, was born in 1934, Kharkov was the head of the, was the capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine. And Kharkov remains in Ukraine, but it is a largely Russian speaking city. So my mother's family was, came from, had a quite a long historical connection with Ukraine and
00:17:28
Speaker
I do go into it at some length, not because people's family histories are intrinsically interesting. Usually it's quite exactly the opposite. But in this particular case with my mother's family, they are illustrative of something kind of quite important. And that is essentially two things is an absolutely unambiguously imperial relationship between Russia and Ukraine, and also how closely intertwined that relationship is.
00:17:57
Speaker
So specifically, the first ancestor of mine that we know of went to what is today Ukraine in 1783, in the entourage of Catherine II of the emperors. And he was, this guy's father had been the
00:18:18
Speaker
Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Imperial Army. And his young son accompanies the Empress on her progress through the newly kind of annexed lands of South Russia. So I mean, it's really just its empire, you know, unambiguously, it's an imperial project to annex, you know, a fundamentally alien part of what is essentially a foreign country, the Tatas of Crimea.
00:18:46
Speaker
But as for the rest of what is now Crimea, particularly like the Donbas was actually, it gets more complicated, gets more ambiguous because you have in the West of Ukraine, you know, unambiguously
00:19:00
Speaker
Ukrainian speaking, homogenous, non Russian culture in the far west of Ukraine. In the east of Ukraine, you have a sort of wild, somewhat analogous to what happens a century later in America, you have basically have sort of the Wild West situation, it's settled by the emperors. And going forward, this guy, this guy's great nephew is
00:19:25
Speaker
my six, seven times great grandfather was governor of Kiev under Nicholas I. I'm sorry to report a famous anti-Semite and anti-Ukrainian, but his job was literally to administer Kiev for the Russian Empire. So again, generations and generations, it's a long story, but the very short version is the family of the bibikovs is interesting because seven generations of them live
00:19:55
Speaker
live and die in Ukraine, they get back and forth to St Petersburg, they do not in any way consider themselves to be Ukrainians. So in that sense, but nonetheless, neither do they consider the Ukraine which they're administering, and very importantly, the last and most interesting member of this family is my grandfather, Boris Bibikov, who becomes an enthusiastic Bolshevik,
00:20:25
Speaker
And although he would hate that comparison, hate this comparison, essentially what he's doing for Stalin as the builder, one of the builders of the Kharkov tractor factory, sort of the major show pieces of industrialization and collectivization in 1929 to 1931 is when the Kharkov tractor factory is built. He's essentially doing the same thing for the Soviet empire as his ancestors had done for the Russian empire.
00:20:56
Speaker
And by the way, I should add, he gets shot in 1937 because he opposes Stalin and is horrified by the starvation that the first five year plan has wrought. So, you know, ultimately he ends up on the side of the angels. But while it's an imperial relationship, it's also not the same kind of imperial relationship as, you know, Britain and India. It's much more similar to
00:21:22
Speaker
you know England and Ireland or England and Scotland. Or England and Scotland is actually a much better example because you have throughout the 18th and 19th centuries a you know essentially interchangeable elite.
00:21:38
Speaker
Lots of major bureaucrats and statesmen go from Kiev to St. Petersburg and may have glittering careers in the court of Catherine in the second and throughout the 19th century. And the other way around, lots of Russian noblemen come to Ukraine and feel themselves as imperial administrators, governors, pushkin and so on. They all feel themselves completely at home.
00:22:01
Speaker
And so the elites are interchangeable between Kiev and Petersburg without feeling that they're in a different country. Anyway, all that to say that, yes, I do have a Russian, oh, in fact, Ukrainian, it's complicated, yeah, part of my family. And that history is illustrative of something that's really important
00:22:29
Speaker
in my story, and that is kind of what makes this war so vicious and bitter. I mean, it's a family struggle. It's not a neighborly struggle. It's not Germany invading Poland or France. It's close. And that's one of the elements, one of the ambiguities of this war, and it's one of the,
00:22:59
Speaker
misunderstandings on which Putin of course built his premise on the war because Putin fundamentally at base, if you were to point to any kind of
00:23:10
Speaker
the absolute root of root causes about his attitudes to Ukraine, Putin's attitudes to Ukraine. He doesn't believe that Russian speaking Ukrainians are Ukrainian, basically. He thinks they're just like Russians with an accent. I was about to ask you if you had, I think I've asked most of the
00:23:30
Speaker
the people on the show who were writing about Russia, this question, it's an unanswerable question, or maybe it's answerable, but it would take a long time. If you had to boil this down to like one moment that caused the Russia-Ukraine war, I was going to ask how you would
Putin's Misconceptions and Minsk Accords
00:23:46
Speaker
answer that. It sounds like you just partially did, but would you have anything to add to that?
00:23:53
Speaker
Well, that's not really a moment. I mean, it's the fundamental premise on which the war has been fought is that Putin genuinely believes that these people are Russian. I mean, he said the other day, literally yesterday, he said Odessa is a Russian city, a little bit Jewish, but basically it's a Russian city. I mean, he thinks that all of Eastern Ukraine is not Ukrainian. And one of the weird paradoxes and things that are very often forgotten is that
00:24:23
Speaker
both in Putin's slightly wacky but very interesting historical essay that he writes, plus in his fateful speech that he gives right at the beginning of the war. In both of those speeches and documents, he goes out of his way to say, I respect Ukrainian statehood and Ukrainian culture, except
00:24:52
Speaker
he doesn't consider that the east of Ukraine is part of that culture. So there's a big, one of the big debates, which I'm sure we can get on in more detail, but that is, you asked me for one basic fundamental moment. The fundamental premise is that he doesn't think that most Ukrainians are Ukrainian. He thinks they're just sort of species of Russians. The moment I think that
00:25:22
Speaker
War really becomes inevitable. I think possibly, actually, it's earlier than most people think. It's the moment that in October 2019, when a very crucial thing does not happen in Eastern Ukraine. This is gonna require three sentence explanation.
00:25:48
Speaker
In October 2019, the newly elected president of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky, does a deal with the rebel republics of Donbass to hold a referendum. It's a key condition of the Minsk accords to hold a referendum on whether they're going to have their old status within Ukraine or whether they're going to have
00:26:18
Speaker
a special status. Obviously, they're all going to vote for special status. And this vote is going to be under the supervision of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the OSCE. If that vote had happened in October 2019, there would not be a war today. The reason it didn't happen was that there was an extremely strong vehement opposition from Ukrainian ultranationalists.
00:26:46
Speaker
particularly from Azov, who were electorally tiny, insignificant vote, proportion of the Ukrainian population. But nonetheless, they are armed. They are all veterans. And they came out on the streets and said, we're going to make another Maidan and kick you out of power. And clearly, they literally threatened Zelensky's life if he went ahead with a vote on the grounds that blood has been spilled. We cannot allow this compromise.
00:27:14
Speaker
So if you're asking for one moment when this war tipped from possibility into probability, it was that moment when Zelensky completely failed in his attempts to reincorporate the rebel republics of the Donbass back into Ukraine. And that also signaled a moment when all of the Kremlin's diplomacy from 2014 right up to
00:27:43
Speaker
2019 had always been to insist that the Donbass was part of Ukraine. That was the official Kremlin line. It's definitely part of Ukraine. And to try and reincorporate those rebel pro-Russian areas back into Kiev. Now,
00:28:03
Speaker
You know, if the readers that have not been doing sort of been elbow deep in all this sort of backstory, that sounds crazy. Like, you know, what are we talking about? Like, really? Like Putin thought that Donbass was part of Ukraine. Yes, he definitely did. He said it like five million times. So what changed? What changed was until 2019,
00:28:25
Speaker
Putin has a strategy to get all those pro-Russian guys from the Donbass, from the east of Ukraine, back into Kiev politics to mess them up, to use a very polite term. But he wants those guys in the tent.
00:28:44
Speaker
doing their pro-Russian thing in Kiev. That's his strategy to prevent Kiev from drifting off into NATO and the EU and all that. In October 2019, that strategy fails. That's not going to happen. We're going to have to go to plan B. So what is plan B ends up being, we actually just have to occupy it now. Do you think this is one of those moments in history where we're looking back
00:29:11
Speaker
we should have known that this war was brewing.
Was the Russia-Ukraine War Inevitable?
00:29:16
Speaker
Given Putin's historical, we were talking about the essay that he wrote, given his historical attitude towards Ukraine, given his invasion of Georgia and of Crimea, given what you were just talking about, do you think we should have been as surprised as we were when he invaded Ukraine?
00:29:37
Speaker
No, I definitely don't think there's anything inevitable about it. Furthermore, I think that the question is littered with... The question in some ways answers itself because if you... The easy narrative is to say, you know, he is an imperialist. You know, his country has a historical form on invading its neighbors. You know, he's just written what reads a lot like an imperialist manifesto.
00:30:06
Speaker
and so on. And, you know, he's already invaded a foreign country in the form of Georgia. Therefore, obviously, you know, Ukraine is next on the list. Therefore, you know, you're an idiot if you didn't think that, you know, if you didn't expect him to take a chunk out of Ukraine because he's an investor imperialist. I mean, this is basically what, you know, all polls and all bolts tell me. I had a big debate with Radak Sikorsky,
00:30:37
Speaker
former foreign minister of Poland about this. And this is his point, like, you know, you're an idiot, we warned you. However, I kind of disagree with that logic. One, chronologically, 2008, he invades Georgia.
00:30:56
Speaker
And then he does indeed actually invade Georgia properly, but he invades, what he does is he occupies two breakaway territories of Georgia that have declared themselves to be independent of Georgia in 1992 to three, after the fall of the Soviet Union. Does he annex Uphysia and South Ossetia, those Georgian breakaway republics? He does not. Putin, who's supposedly an imperialist, right, like his whole agenda is expanding the Russian empire,
00:31:27
Speaker
he should incorporate those territories into Russia, but he doesn't, but for a really simple reason, because there's no Russians there. There's like Abkhaz there and the South Ossetians there. And I mean, they happen to be Christian, but they're not Russians. And this historical essay, you could read it as an imperialist manifesto, but I don't think it is an imperialist manifesto. What it is is,
00:31:56
Speaker
an appeal, I mean, it basically is sort of historically somewhat dubious, but the thrust of it is not that Moscow is the inevitable imperial master of Ukraine. It's that Ukraine and Russia should be friends because we are supposedly kind of one people. And therefore, we should not let the Americans divide us. And by the way, he also says that he has respect
00:32:26
Speaker
for Ukrainian culture and for Ukrainian language and people and so on. But I think it's a misreading of Putin to call him an imperialist in the sense that he's just going to continue consuming the entirety of Ukraine and then move on to the Baltics and Poland and so on. I think that's a misreading.
00:32:50
Speaker
I think he's not an imperialist, I think he's an ethno-nationalist.
Putin's Ethnonationalism and Motivations
00:32:55
Speaker
So that sounds like a completely sort of nonsense, you know, hair-splitting, international relations kind of jargon thing. But actually, it has really, it has an important real world significance. Because if he is just a mad imperialist, you know, then we have to deal with him in some ways. In one way, if
00:33:15
Speaker
his notional mission is just to save the Russians that are caught inside Ukraine from Nazis in Kiev, then that's a different story. That's a much more limited scope.
00:33:37
Speaker
And you may ask, well, if he was just talking about rescuing the people of Eastern Ukraine, why did he try and invade Kiev? So there's an easy answer to that, is that the intention of going for Kiev was, I think it's pretty clear, that he didn't intend to seize Kiev and hold Kiev. It was essentially just a massively aggravated coup, an armed coup.
00:34:04
Speaker
It's pretty clear that he intended to install Victor Midvitchuk, his favorite oligarch, the guy who'd been putting all these sort of lies into his head about how the Russian speakers of Eastern Ukraine were just dying to be liberated from Zelensky and from fascism and so on, entirely self-servingly, because it happens not to be true. But it was really about regime change in Kiev.
00:34:34
Speaker
and then probably occupying what he regarded as Russian areas in Donbas and Zaporozha. But just to finish up on the whole motivation part, like the imperialist part, imperialism in question, the one quote that everybody knows from Vladimir Putin is what he told the federal
00:35:04
Speaker
assemblies in November 2005, quote, the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. That's the quote that everyone knows. However, people forget the first half of that sentence, because what Putin actually said was, for the millions of Russians who found themselves trapped outside the borders of their homeland, comma, the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century.
00:35:34
Speaker
I mean, that's really important difference. It's really important because he's talking about those Russians, those poor Russians that he kind of, as the savior of Russians and, you know, the uniter of the Slavic peoples, it is now his mission to
00:35:52
Speaker
to save them. That was the first time that I had ever heard that when you wrote about that. You're right, that never gets mentioned with that statement, although it is his most famous quote. And I was very surprised to read that.
00:36:10
Speaker
Another thing that surprised me, just talking a little bit about Putin, because I've always felt like I've never quite gotten a grasp on how Putin is viewed. I mean, I know a lot of, obviously he's very popular, but you write about how, and I'm paraphrasing here,
00:36:28
Speaker
But basically, Putin's real attraction in Russia is that he's just like everybody else, but a little bit smarter. He's the everyman, but just like a little bit more than that. Talk a little bit about those perceptions of Putin.
00:36:44
Speaker
Well, I mean, I don't think it's an incredible leap for many of your American listeners. I was thinking the same way. When I read that, I thought the same thing. You don't get their minds around this concept of like, you know, sort of Mr. Ordinary Guy, you know, goes to what, you know, Mr. Smith goes to Washington. I mean, you know, Putin, you know, the Putin is,
00:37:10
Speaker
It's very, Putin is a populist as much as a dictator. He's in fact, I mean, he's an authoritarian leader, but he doesn't rule through terror. Primarily, I mean, he uses a bit of terror. I mean, frankly, in terms of, you know,
00:37:28
Speaker
the scale, it's, you know, very few people have been put in jail for significant, I mean, it's kind of horrific that they have, that anyone has been, but you know, the actual application of, I mean, we're not talking about 1937, the actual application of like state force and violence, it's kind of, it's very small, it's very limited, it's very dastardly. I mean, they apply it very precisely to silence opposition.
00:37:54
Speaker
It's not through coercion that he rules, it's through an appeal to Russian every person. And that was the secret of his success. He made people prosperous. He sort of spoke their language, he reassured them and
00:38:10
Speaker
he was the sort of safe, steady pair of hands, which of course is a little bit different from the Trump phenomenon because Trump claims to be sort of draining the swamp and going against the Washington machine and so on.
00:38:27
Speaker
The similarity is that his appeal is very much to ordinary people, ordinary people's concerns, and to present himself as rather down-to-earth, weirdly, a saviour. He doesn't wear fancy uniforms, he's not like Idi Amin,
00:38:53
Speaker
he's actually kind of always in a in his boring suit he always has his shy smile and there's actually not very much imperial pomp to his public image.
Kremlin's Disorganization and Secretive Operations
00:39:03
Speaker
Well, let's talk a little bit about some of the accounts that you write about in your book. So you've got accounts from people who are inside, like the Kremlin and inside the Russian propaganda machine. What's important to you about these accounts? What surprised you and what do we have to learn from them? Well, in terms of, I mean, inside the Kremlin, I just have one
00:39:31
Speaker
sort of somewhat juicy piece of gossip. And that was the, for somebody who had lunch with, you know, someone who's known Putin personally for 20 years, who had lunch with
00:39:45
Speaker
the Dmitry Piskov Putin spokesman on the Monday after the fateful Security Council meeting followed by war. And he just told me this person just told me a couple of juicy tidbits is that according to Piskov, the participants of that Security Council meeting, you know, where they all sit in the hall and tell Vladimir Putin, you know, reasons why they agree with him.
00:40:12
Speaker
It's all sort of very sort of spooky and strange and a bit Brezhnevian. It's a sort of performative sort of rituals of obedience and sort of Putin showing off. So the tip bit of information that I have is that all the people there were told that it was going out live, but it wasn't.
00:40:35
Speaker
were just lied to. This is supposedly the 21 most powerful people in Russia they were just lied to, because you can see from their watches that it's pre-recorded. Secondly, and most importantly, that only four people in the room knew the actual full plan. So that's including, so literally the Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov did not know that there was a full plan to invade Kiev.
00:40:59
Speaker
You know, there was only, it was only Nikolai Patrashev, the head of the Security Council, Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the FSP, Putin himself, Sergei Shigu, the defense minister. It's not even, and, sorry, and Sergei Narushkin, who's the head of foreign intelligence, plus Putin himself. So, you know, so in terms of sort of inside gossip, that's just my little sort of piece of inside gossip. In terms of what's going on in the propaganda machine, it's really interesting
00:41:28
Speaker
What's interesting about that is literally nobody in the state propaganda apparatus had any warning that there was going to be a full scale invasion. And it is indeed, it's interesting and sort of slightly unusual and not exactly what one would expect the workings of
00:41:54
Speaker
the state propaganda, not precisely what you would expect. So it's not like, you know, there's like a sort of an email that goes out to everyone or there's a phone call or a conference. It's not exactly like that. So to an extent, obviously all the editors and directors of the news channels, there is a kind of government line and there is a meeting in the Kremlin, in fact, every day, every once a week.
00:42:20
Speaker
chaired by one of Piskov's deputies to sort of give the general line. But the propaganda product is largely left up to the devices of the editors and the producers and so on. But the telling part, when we're talking about the beginning of the war, is they did not do any preparation to soften up the population or really
00:42:50
Speaker
to get people prepared for a full scale war beforehand. What they were doing just before, literally just like 24 hours basically before the invasion begins, there's a shift. Suddenly they throw out the old playbook state media had been reporting that it's all about, that we will never invade.
00:43:20
Speaker
Lavrov is saying it's all about diplomacy and then they get a signal there, a new message. There are attacks on the breakaway republics of the Donbas. The Ukrainians are attacking the Donbas.
00:43:32
Speaker
So it's like a little tiny little window when they hit that line and then bang out of the window that goes and suddenly we're like, you know, the tanks rolling into Kiev. And so even the Kremlin's propagandists are themselves kind of almost caught out by the speed of events, which tells you, I think, something about how the Kremlin operates, how secretive they are. I don't know exactly what it means, but it means that they
00:44:02
Speaker
that they're very, very confident of their control over the media. That they can just like, you sort of say, oh, look, so, yeah, sorry, guys, like, you know, like, you know, we told you we weren't going to invade like yesterday, but we're invading tomorrow, you know, and, you know, go, go screw yourselves, you know, and, and, you know, we'll just, we'll just manage it. We can just turn around this super tanker, you know, because, you know, it's our super tanker. You know, we're, we're, we're in control of it. And so, so it's, it's, it does demonstrate a sort of
00:44:32
Speaker
in a paranoia and also confidence in the propaganda product. What else, just thinking about the first six months of the war, which is what your book is about, what else do you think is interesting about this period of time that still today, so your book was 2022, now we're in 2023, of course.
Attritional Nature of the War
00:44:54
Speaker
What else do you think is especially interesting that most people don't understand today about those first six months? Well, actually, I did.
00:45:03
Speaker
So I filed the first version was complete on the beginning of October 22, and it was distributed, printed and published in Britain a month later, which is kind of amazing. So authors, next time, like your editor tells you it's going to take a year to like, you know, edit and set and description of the book like, no, they lie. I promise you.
00:45:29
Speaker
They can do it in one month. I literally did it. Although actually a lot of it was already, you know, submitted and edited, but like in a month, October 22. And then I actually, I thought I was going to do a gigantic update and rewrite for the paperback, which I've submitted in May.
00:45:50
Speaker
actually weirdly, basically nothing really changed, to be honest, significantly. So if your question is what was most surprising about the opening phase of the war, the most surprising thing was that the Ukrainians turned out to be so amazingly tenacious and smart about their defenses in the north.
00:46:16
Speaker
And, but the other thing that people perhaps don't really appreciate is how well the thing, everything went to plan in the South. So we kind of tend to think that this, this is all just sort of general screw up and, you know, Russia had no idea that it was bitten off far more than it can chew. They went for Kiev, they got blown to pieces outside Kiev and they had to retreat, retreat, humiliating me.
00:46:45
Speaker
that's all true, you know, with the horrific war crimes that they committed. That's all true around Kiev. What people tend not to, or tend to sort of gloss over was the fact that the Russian invasion from Crimea into Herzon into and from Donbass into through through through the through the rest of of through from
00:47:13
Speaker
separatist Donbass into pro-Ukrainian Donbass and into Zaporozh and that was all done absolute textbook blitzkrieg style. The regional governors were all bribed. The border posts opened up. The mined bridges were not blown up. Within four hours they have reached the
00:47:40
Speaker
the Nipur and they've taken the Kahofka Dam. There's no resistance. There's no resistance in Hason. The only real point of resistance is in Mariupol, which as we now know, they spend several months doing a sort of Stalingrad or grinding it flat. But the surprising thing is
00:48:06
Speaker
the bravery and tenacity of the Ukrainian resistance and the incredible stupidity and sort of tactical idiocy of the advance, particularly in the north. And there's a really simple answer to why it happened like that, is because the whole operation was planned to essentially, was planned without any real provision for overcoming
00:48:36
Speaker
opposition. They did not think they would be opposed. They reckon they'd do a little bit of fighting with the regular Ukrainian troops, but they just assumed that it was just going to be 2014 Crimea all over again when they were not opposed. That's actually really significant because if you go to war on a delusion,
00:49:01
Speaker
One of my chapters is called The Price of Illusion. If your illusion is that the Russian speakers of Ukraine are basically Russians and they're just yearning to be liberated, and that illusion turns out to be when you realize it's an illusion is when they start to resist, and that's exactly what happens.
00:49:23
Speaker
Well, let's talk about your... So here we are in October, 2023. Let's talk about your current assessment of the war and how things are going. How would you say things for the Russians and for the Ukrainians? How are things going right now? I think they're going pretty badly for both sides, to be honest. But the bottom line is that Russia has four times more population than Ukraine and its economy is 15 times larger.
00:49:53
Speaker
Russia has managed to basically overcome sanctions. I'm not saying sanctions have not damaged the Russian economy. They kind of have. They obviously have. But nonetheless, both in terms of exporting its oil, particularly they're not exporting gas, but they are exporting oil and importing sort of the tech they need.
00:50:13
Speaker
they've kind of managed to shrug off sanctions. And so why do I start my answer with the relative sizes of Russia and Ukraine? Because if you're actually talking about an attritional war, which is essentially what Russia and Ukraine are in now, then ultimately, if that's your dynamic, who can stay on and who can sort of take the punches, you know, who can do that sort of, you know,
00:50:39
Speaker
the relative size becomes decisive, unfortunately. And another way of saying that is if you sort of draw a graph of
00:50:51
Speaker
quality versus quantity. In other words, you have superior Ukrainian morale, equipment, motivation, command and control, intelligence, whatever. So let's say the Ukrainians have got the quality and Russians have got the quantity. They've got their sort of North Korean shells. They've got their sort of Iranian drones and everything. But unfortunately, there is a point where quantity beats quality. There is.
00:51:22
Speaker
My fear is that actually the Ukrainians dream of a major military breakthrough has just proved to be in terms of their sort of big armored offensive, their summer offensive.
00:51:41
Speaker
To put it crudely, I mean, we're $60 billion in with the aid to Ukraine and they've taken nine kilometers, roughly speaking. I mean, it's, you know, horrifically slow going, far more slow going than they ever anticipated. It's not something that's ever really been anticipated as a part of modern war because, you know, it's not a war that NATO would ever fight or could ever fight because NATO is all about establishing air superiority.
00:52:11
Speaker
and you have airborne capability. Modern NATO fighting is not about minefields and artillery. You only do that in a war where neither side has air superiority. It's just sort of a unique, super generous military dynamic. And unfortunately, the only thing that's really working for either side is
00:52:40
Speaker
is missiles. So Ukrainians have very successfully used their new British-provided medium-range cruise missiles to essentially kick the Russians out of the Black Sea port of Sevastopol. They've, this week, withdrawn their entire fleet to Novorayevsk. But at the same time, the Russians have been doing the same thing. They've been also using the Iskandar
00:53:11
Speaker
cruise missiles to inflict, you know, horrific airstrikes within, within Haikov province. And it's pretty clear that they're going to do the same things they did last winter. And that is systematically destroy all of Ukraine's electricity and energy infrastructure. So if that's the war we're in, we're not moving anywhere on the ground.
00:53:33
Speaker
despite, and this just becomes a sort of rocket artillery and cruise missile contest, then the Ukrainians just don't really have any realistic chance of attaining what they claim is their ultimate goal for victory, which is winning back every inch of their territory that they've lost to the Russians.
00:54:01
Speaker
Yeah, well, I've got, well first, oh, and thank you so much for all your answers to all my questions. It's really been a wonderful interview. One last question I've got for you here before we wrap up. You write, though we don't know how the conflict will end, we already know how it will not end. There will be no complete victory for either Russia or Ukraine.
Nuclear Deterrence and Military Stalemate
00:54:25
Speaker
Explain that.
00:54:27
Speaker
Well, Russia has got nukes. Russia has changed the rules of war because it's not Iraq, it's not Syria, it's not Libya. It can't just be pulverized or Serbia for that matter.
00:54:49
Speaker
If Russia did not have nukes, you could just deal with it like any other medium-sized military power and punish it for its violation of international borders. Because Russia has got nukes, it's unattackable.
00:55:06
Speaker
And that's a fundamental reason why Ukraine, why NATO wants to absolutely at all costs avoid a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia. That's one of the bottom line first principles of the US military engagement. As we know, that's literally the first thing that Mark Milley briefed Joe Biden on in his very first meeting.
00:55:35
Speaker
briefing in the White House at the beginning of the war. How do we avoid a kinetic direct confrontation with Russia?
00:55:41
Speaker
So that always means that the aid to Ukraine is going to be contingent. And there's no way other than the Ukrainians giving the Ukrainians the tools to do as much as they can themselves. But you can't pile in behind the Ukrainians in their defense as the West was able to pile in behind in the defense of Kosovo Albanians or Kuwaitis or whatever. That's just not going to happen. It can't happen in this particular conflict.
00:56:09
Speaker
and at the same time neither can Russia completely really hope to make any significant advance beyond that that it's already taken and has simply because the weaponry that's being supplied and the intelligence that's being supplied are
00:56:29
Speaker
are effective at one thing and that is area of denial. In other words, if there is a Russian attack, then you can actually use all that NATO rocketry and so on to stop that happening. So just on a military strategic level, there's no real chance that you can defeat Russia because of nukes and there's no chance that Russia will be able to fully defeat Ukraine because it has enough weaponry and it has enough NATO support to avoid that ever happening. So therefore you end up with some kind of species of
00:56:59
Speaker
of deadlock and stalemate, I'm sorry to say. Well, I probably should have chosen a less pessimistic question to end on. But thank you for that. Owen, if people want to stay in touch with your work, if they want to check out what you're writing about, how can people stay in touch with you?
00:57:19
Speaker
It's on Twitter, whatever it's called now, x. .omath. O-M-A-T-H is pretty obvious that it's me. But yeah, that's where I post all my stuff, more or less. Wonderful. Well, Owen Matthews, Overreach, the inside story of Putin's war against Ukraine, now out in paperback. Go buy a copy. Go check it out from your library. What an interesting story here, Owen. And thank you so much for your time today. My great pleasure.