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

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A respected journalist draws on deep knowledge to explain the thinking behind Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Owen Matthews brings his own experience to the account from two angles: that of a man raising a family, with his Russian wife, living in Russia; and of a journalist who has reported from within and about Russia and its politics and wars for over a quarter of a century.

Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise - Goodreads

The noted conservative economist delivers arguments both fiscal and political against social justice initiatives such as welfare and a federal minimum wage. While Shirk doesn’t go quite this far, it is both ironic and fitting that Xi’s prdecessors, incl. Hu Jintao and Jang Zemin, ultimately built governments of such self-dealing and logrolling it would have made the bureaucracies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush blush with shame. Feb 2022, quote formerly pro-NATO Putin rightly stating before wrongly invading, "De-Nazify Ukraine." Russia loses the war: Putin can be removed and assassinated, his successor will surely be much worse. The title refers to Putin’s hubris in launching the Ukraine invasion, yet this book is much more, charting how the dream of reclaiming Moscow’s old empire went from “the marginal fringes of Russian politics to become official Kremlin policy”.This means that the book ends on more pessimistic note than is in retrospect justified. In September the Ukrainian army was pushing to recapture as much land as possible before winter set in and Europe froze under a natural gas embargo. As I read this in late January 2023 Europe hasn't frozen, wholesale gas prices have fallen and most Western nations are tripping over themselves to donate heavy weapons to Ukraine.

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

An insider’s account of the rampant misconduct within the Trump administration, including the tumult surrounding the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. Using the accounts of current and former insiders from the Kremlin and its propaganda machine, the testimony of captured Russian soldiers and on-the-ground reporting from Russia and Ukraine, Overreach tells the story not only of the war’s causes but how the first six months unfolded. A key observer of China provides a detailed account of that nation’s political transformation under its current leaders. The author details the development of Russian nationalist attitudes from the fall of the Soviet Union and up the invasion. He also gives a detailed account of many of the idealogues that introduced Putin to Russian Ultranationalism and Fascism, in addition to figures in his inner circle. The portraits painted of figures such as Nikolai Patruschev are in particular quite chilling, being if anything more steeped in paranoia and conspiracy theory thinking. Patruschev is also thought to have been behind the planning and execution of both the Litvinenko assassination and the attempted assassinations of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. Nor, in a country that still suffers an “addiction to imperial fantasies”, is it likely that Putin’s replacement will be Gorbachev 2.0. Nationalism, Matthews says, is a far more powerful current in Russia than pro-Western liberalism. He adds: “A military defeat at the hands of NATO weaponry would likely strengthen, not weaken, that tendency.”

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Even Ukrainian Russian speakers do not like to join Putin’s Russia. After all, they are much richer than the Russians. b) A country so corrupt that the new bridge built for a state of the art high-speed train collapses within a couple years because its builders opted to use low-grade concrete and pay out enormous bribes to get the contract? The world is on their side,” one old friend tells Matthews while doom-scrolling the news at her barstool. “But Russians? Everyone hates Russians. Even most Russians hate people like us, who are against the regime.” Matthews’ focus on the major Russian non-Putin characters makes Chapter 4 and 5 the best and most interesting parts of the book. Matthews describes Surkov as “the most paradoxical and fascinating figure ever to have worked in Putin’s Kremlin”, and makes his case well. The portrait of Patrushev is also helpful for introducing readers to an essential figure in Russia’s recent past, the current war, and possibly the future too. The first section of Chapter 5 deserves a book of its own (perhaps by Matthews, perhaps by Mark Galeotti, whose work Matthews draws on) charting the long, agonising decline of the so-called “liberals” in the Kremlin, from Yegor Gaidar to Surkov, as they consistently failed to deliver the results that successive Russian leaders wanted. Matthews has, therefore, set himself a difficult task by seeking to write “a first draft of the history of how the war began – and how the conflict moved from Russia’s blitzkrieg through stalemate to Ukrainian counter-offensive.” The focus of the book is what Matthews describes as “the most compelling mystery at the heart of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine…what was the true reason that Putin decided to go to war?”

OVERREACH | Kirkus Reviews OVERREACH | Kirkus Reviews

Yet in a war already extensively reported from the Ukrainian side, it is Matthews’s take from Russia that may jolt readers the most. Russians, he points out, are long used to hardship, so despite the misery caused by sanctions and mobilisation, things would have to get “far, far worse” for any anti-Putin uprising. The key take home points are that the highly illiberal nature of the Control Coalition (Propaganda Department, People's Armed Police, PLA and MSS) seized upon unrest in 2008 and 2009 to expand state power and curtail personal freedoms and the bandwagoning nature of Chinese politics enabled Xi Jinping to amass greater personal power that was afforded to either Hu, Jiang or Deng. The book contains some decent policy prescriptions that policy makers would do well to read, as the US has itself also overreached in its response to China, and a more balanced approach can be carved out.Rough edges and a weaker third act do not prevent Overreach from achieving its aims. It is timely, compelling and arguably more perceptive than could reasonably be expected so soon. It is strongly recommended, especially for readers who have been following the war since February 2022, or who have some prior knowledge of Putin or Russian politics. We hear the story of Vadim Shishimarin, a 21 year old Russian solider whose experience of the war involved sitting for days in a parked armoured vehicle, being blown up, seeing a dozen of his comrades killed, wandering through the countryside north of Kiev, sleeping in sheds and pigsties before turning himself at the fist Ukrainian town. The only reason we know this story of incompetence and waste is that, as he tried to escape in a stolen car, he gunned down Oleksandr Shelipov, a retired man out for ride on his bike. He called his new program “socialism with a human face,” in fact too human for his conservative opponents. Dubcek’s reforms were snubbed out when Warsaw Pact countries answered with columns of Russian tanks. The following year he was dumped from the leadership of the Party. When observing a war from a far the tendency to view things in terms of battles and grand strategies sets in and the stories of suffering and heroism on the ground can often be lost in the fog of war. The use of second-hand sources, though, is the only way to provide a proper overview: in a war this big, no reporter can be everywhere. And besides, much of this book’s value is in exploring the war’s deeper roots.

Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise | Oxford Academic Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise | Oxford Academic

Susan L. Shirk’s Overreach remarkably charts the changes of Chinese leadership at home and their actions abroad since the demise of Mao Tsedong. declining superpower, one China was well on its way to supplanting. Internationally, China began to act more belligerently with its neighbors. Internally, circumstances have enabled Xi Jinping to consolidate more power than any leader since Mao Zedong.Overreach คลี่คลายคำถามข้างต้นและคำถามอื่นๆ ที่เกี่ยวข้องกับต้นตอของสงครามอย่างน่าสนใจ ผ่านการย่อยข้อมูลมหาศาลและการสัมภาษณ์คนหลายร้อยคนทั้งในและนอกเครมลิน กระบวนการได้มาซึ่งข้อมูลของผู้เขีย��ก็น่าติดตามไม่แพ้เส้นเรื่องหลัก ทหารรัสเซียหลายคนให้การหลังจากที่ตกเป็นเชลย บางคนยอมให้ข้อมูลแบบนิรนาม ต้องนัดพบกันในสวนสาธารณะตามเวลาที่กำหนด คนสนิทของปูตินหลายคนยอมให้ข้อมูลแต่ระวังตัวแจ ชาวรัสเซียจำนวนมากที่รักชาติแต่ไม่รักปูตินอยากให้โลกรู้ว่าพวกเขาคิดอะไร Shirk’s prescription for US Presidents handling the Chinese Leviathan in international affairs is to fix democracy at home and slowly feed incentives to the Chinese leadership to want to cooperate with its neighbours so that they will bully them less. True, this is not a classic war reporter’s tale of frontline action. Some of Matthews’s accounts of key battles, for example, are not first-hand but recreated through interviews and cuttings. In recounting how Kremlin troops were woefully ill-prepared, for example, he draws on testimony to a Ukrainian war crimes court by a young Russian squaddie who pleaded guilty to shooting a civilian after his armoured convoy was ambushed. Susan L. Shirk is a Research Professor and Chair of the 21st Century China Center at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, UC San Diego. From 1997-2000, she served as the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs, with responsibility for China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mongolia. As with all books published in the midst of war this book is already somewhat out of date. Matthews records events up to the end of September 2022. So the Kharkiv offensive of that month is covered but the Russian retreat from Kherson is not. Nor is the Russian offensive around Bakhmut in the winter of 22/23.