CURRENT
Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on Ukraine
by Owen Matthews (Mudlark £25, 432 pages)
Readers of this newspaper know the name of Owen Matthews, a veteran Moscow correspondent, from articles he wrote on Russia and Ukraine.
But his book on the war now raging between these two countries – an act of President Putin’s pure and vicious decision – reveals for the first time the depth of his own family’s entanglement in the complex backdrop of conflicting national identities.
Or as he puts it: “We all like to think that we think rationally. But a little bit of us, a little bit deep, thinks with our blood.” For Matthew’s mother, Lyudmila Bibikova, was born in Kharkiv, a predominantly Russian-speaking city in the heart of the Ukrainian territories that Putin is keen to annex; and her own parents were both born in what is now the Ukrainian country.
Readers of this newspaper know the name of Owen Matthews, a veteran Moscow correspondent, from articles he wrote on Russia and Ukraine
But as Matthews goes on to explain, “The Bibikov family did not consider themselves Ukrainians. For two centuries, the Bibikovs played a significant part in Russia’s imperial role in Ukraine, first as servants to the tsars and later as loyal lieutenants to Soviet power. Like it or not, my family history – my blood – is closely connected not only to Ukraine and Russia, but also to the history of the Russian Empire.”
Although Putin is widely seen as motivated to rebuild the Soviet Union — and Ukraine’s secession in 1991 was the death knell for the USSR — the Russian president sees himself as the heir to Catherine the Great, who subjugated most of Ukraine to the Kremlin’s rule.
And Matthews says his ancestor, Captain Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Bibikov, was “one of the Russian officers who escorted the Empress through the newly conquered lands of southern and western Ukraine on her first imperial advance.”
A more recent ancestor, Boris Bibikov, had been a leading member of the Ukrainian Communist Party and was among those who made the fateful decision to speak up internally about the appalling suffering inflicted on Ukrainians as a result of Stalin’s brutal use of “agriculture.” collectivization”, in which up to 7 million people starved to death: Boris Bibikov, recipient of the Order of Lenin, met his own end in 1937 during Stalin’s purge of the Communist Party.
It is the memory of the mass starvation of the 1930s – holodomor, as it is called in Ukraine – that explains the cruelty and passion with which the nation today resists Moscow.
Inside Russia, the so-called “military special operation” has been described by Putin and his propagandists as an attempt to rescue Russian-speaking Ukrainians from “Nazis” – playing on the fact that many in Ukraine celebrate the memory of Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera, who killed the Nazis as allies in the fight for independence from Moscow.
For Matthew’s mother, Lyudmila Bibikova, was born in Kharkiv, a predominantly Russian-speaking city in the heart of the Ukrainian territories that Putin is keen to annex; and her own parents were both born in what is now the Ukrainian country
However, as the author points out, not only is Ukrainian President Zelensky Jewish, whose family members were exterminated by the Nazis, he also describes the head of a “major Russian television channel that has been collaborating with the Kremlin for over 20 years.” Zelensky to Matthews as “an annoying little Jew doing politics”.
And the Wagner Group, a Kremlin-funded private army now on the front lines in Ukraine, was founded by Dmitri Utkin: a Russian who sports Nazi eagle tattoos and chose the name because Richard Wagner was Hitler’s favorite composer. Last May, the Federal Intelligence Service revealed that the Wagner Group had recruited “Russian right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis” on a large scale.
But most Russians – whose national pride understandably rests on their country’s military role in the destruction of the Third Reich – seem to swallow Putin’s lies wholeheartedly. You have to believe them.
This causes Matthews anxiety. He writes: “Putin’s propaganda machine has worked – at least insofar as it has produced a broad, publicly accepted consensus in favor of the war.
“The simple truth is that Putin spoke for most Russians. This could be depressing for me, my Russian wife and most of my Russian friends. But the fact that we wished it wasn’t true didn’t make it happen.’
In fact, this book was written before the extraordinary counterattack in late autumn, when Ukrainian forces charged east at high speed and even recaptured Kherson, the only regional capital that fell to Moscow in the first invasion.
But I suspect that the majority of Russians, while now much more concerned about the progress of the war-not-war, will still feel that the action against the nonexistent Ukrainian “Nazis” was justified.
I know that from my own homeland. We hosted a Ukrainian mother and son; She tells me that her relatives in Russia remain convinced that Putin is on the right track and that her flight to the UK is completely unnecessary as talk of Russian attacks on civilians in Ukraine or the Bucha massacre is just Western propaganda is .
Matthews similarly recounts a meeting with a Russian state television editor, Anna Bondarenko (which is a Ukrainian name), at which she “seemed to blame me personally for sanctions and the provocation of war”; and when he asks Bondarenko about her relatives in Ukraine, she replies: “Oh, they all became fascists.
‘They believed all your falsifications about Bucha…told me to go away and stop calling them.’
There will be many more books about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but Owen Matthews’ extraordinary perspective has produced an interim report of particular value.