Rodric Braithwaite

How the West misunderstood Russia’s military capabilities 

Putin’s new army looked lean and mean, but old, inherent weaknesses persisted: over-rigid commanders, demoralised soldiers and shaky logistics

Vladimir Putin in Moscow last month. [Getty Images]

Books about Putin’s war against Ukraine are like the No.11 bus: you wait for ages, then a whole bunch turn up at once. Owen Matthews and Mark Galeotti are among the first. They will eventually be superseded by the scholarly histories. Meanwhile they bring clarity to a picture confused by instant comment in the media. Both are prolific and engaging writers, long-standing and reliable observers of the Russian scene. Both pepper their accounts with illuminating comments by their innumerable Russian and Ukrainian contacts.

Matthews’s involvement in the story is deeply personal. His mother descends from a Mongol who defected to Moscow five centuries ago. An ancestor was appointed by Catherine the Great to help manage newly conquered Ukraine and Crimea. His maternal grandfather, a senior party official, was shot during Stalin’s purges in 1937. But his father was Welsh, from a nation which, like Ukraine, knows what it is like to live in a ‘union’ dominated by a condescending, slightly contemptuous and overwhelmingly powerful ‘elder brother’. So he can empathise with the people involved on both sides of this war.

Putin’s position is increasingly shaky, as even his closest colleagues calculate how to survive his departure

He starts with what he calls the ‘poisoned roots’. Russians and Ukrainians differ violently and emotionally about their history – the 1,000 tangled years which divide and unite them. Matthews gives us an unusually clear and balanced account, which alone would make his book worth reading. His main story begins as the Soviet empire, which emerged a century ago from the empire of the Tsars, flew apart in 1991. The collapse was followed by a decade of economic misery, political chaos, corruption and international irrelevance. Most Russians felt deeply humiliated, none more so than Vladimir Putin, the obscure KGB officer who became president in 2000.

Putin’s first decade was a time of comparative stability and prosperity.

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