Overreach : the Inside Story of Putin’s War Against Ukraine
Interview conducted by Raphael Minder
Central Europe correspondent for the Financial Times
Born in 1971, OWEN MATTHEWS is a British writer, historian and journalist who studied Modern History at Oxford University. Award-winning correspondent and fluent Russian-speaker, he has lived and worked in Moscow for over 25 years. He worked first as a staffer for The Moscow Times and then as Newsweek’s Moscow and Istanbul Bureau Chief. He has covered conflicts in Bosnia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq, Georgia and Eastern Ukraine. He currently contributes to Foreign Policy, Spectator, Daily Mail, Telegraph and The Critic. His first book, Stalin’s Children : Three Generations of Love and War (Bloomsbury, 2008) was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the Orwell Prize for political writing and France’s prix Médicis Étranger. His ten books have been translated into 28 languages. In his latest, Overreach : the Inside Story of Putin’s War Against Ukraine (Mudlark, 2023), Owen Matthews
traces both the historical roots of Russia’s 2022 invasion and the fatal web of disinformation, delusion and bad assumptions inside the Kremlin that led to the attack. Reporting from both Moscow and Kyiv during the war, he weaved an extensive network of contacts in Russia’s government, security services and military enabling him to draw a detailed picture of the personalities and chain of decisions that led to the first year of the conflict. Overreach was awarded the Pushkin House Book Prize 2023.