The Cronies War

One of the small miracles of the Ukraine war is the way that the train system has held up. The carriages rattle towards the West with bombed-out refugees and their pets; incoming bogeys bring in Nato weaponry, while saloon cars with functioning internet transport nervous bigwigs to Kyiv. If they run late because of a drone strike along the track, the train-master apologises to passengers. Ukraine, despite Vladimir Putin’s fiercest efforts, remains a strong, functioning state. Electricity grids hit by Russian Cruise missiles are patched up overnight. After 14 months of war, there is a resilient civil society and a nimble army that can still give the Russians a bloody nose.

Putin started his invasion on the assumption that Ukraine was not a legitimate state, that its government was feeble and that military action against it would be a pushover. It turned out he was wrong. The sharp-eyed reporter and historian Owen Matthews set out to discover why. That means returning to the roots of Putin’s power. How did the project of a Greater Russia become mainstream Putin policy? Who was at Putin’s side when he decided that only an invasion of Ukraine could stop its drift towards western alliances? It is a vicious conflict, he writes, that marks “the final bloody act of the collapse of the Soviet Union”. However, it turns out the war will be seen as the moment when the West understood that democracy has to be fought for.

Matthews brings some heavy journalistic baggage to the task – 27 years, on and off, reporting in Moscow for The Moscow Times, for Newsweek, and for the likes of Foreign Policy and The Spectator. More than that, though, is his familial ties with Russia. He is the son of the late Russia-watcher Mervyn Matthews (whom I knew somewhat) and Lyudmila, daughter of Stalin-era bureaucrat Boris Bibikov. Owen’s maternal grandfather died in the purge of 1937, his grandmother was sent to the Gulag and went insane. Lyudmila and her sister, Owen’s Aunt Lenina, were put in a Soviet orphanage. Owen Matthews has thus developed some remarkably deep insight into the undergrowth of Russian politics from an early age. His range of interviewees, including Kremlin insiders and ultra-nationalists as well as liberals, make him the stand-out analyst of the war.

The evolution of Putin’s thinking from his first smash-and-grab annexation of Crimea in 2014 is down to a complex weave of factors, including a long and distinctly odd Covid lockdown in which he had little direct contact with advisers. But Matthews narrows the ultimate decision to invade Ukraine to two hardline trusties, the prime one being Nikolai Patrushev, a high-flyer in the former KGB. His credo: “The US would much prefer that Russia did not exist at all.”

The other pivotal figure is Aleksandr Bortnikov, another ex-KGB man, who was ordered by Patrushev to oversee the 2006 poisoning in London of Alexander Litvinenko. “A reliable and relentless attack dog,” in the words of Matthews. Why did this inner circle opt for last year’s invasion? After all, Putin had held back in 2014 from a full-scale annexation of Donbas and other Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine.

Three reasons, says Matthews. First, “the jeopardy from Western influence in Ukraine and Russia had become too threatening to ignore – and all attempts to control it by meddling in Ukraine politics had failed”. Second, the economic downside of an invasion was not seen as a deterrent by the inner circle. “A war chest of $650 billion in strategic reserves and European dependence on Russian gas, both carefully built up over a decade, were judged sufficient to ride out and mute Western protests.” This turned out to be one of many miscalculations: dependency on Russian gas has dropped steeply.

Finally, an attack on Ukraine seemed opportune. The western withdrawal from Afghanistan was viewed in the Kremlin as a humiliation. With Angela Merkel’s retirement, there was no single persuasive European leader to rally opposition to the Kremlin. Volodymyr Zelensky looked weak. Military investments were beefing up the Russian army. “Not to strike would be to abandon Ukraine to the West – and fatally expose Russia to the encroaching existential political and military threat.”

Matthews’ book is an indictment not just of ultranationalist-led decision-making, but also what happens when trust breaks down at the top. The succession to Putin, its timing and theatre, concerns everyone with a financial stake in the system. Out of weakness, perhaps, Putin has come to be over-dependent on hardline cronies from the security services to control the pace of change. Matthews quotes a wise critic, Dmitry Bykov: “The special services have always been in the service of the past. Their main task is to stop the passage of time…they do everything in their power to prevent their own abolition.”

The result? It is impossible to see how Putin’s mistakes over the past year can be undone. Impossible, too, to see how a credible peace deal can be reached. The endgame is still a long way off.