HarperCollins has acquired World All Language rights to the new book by veteran Moscow correspondent and historian Owen Matthews. Mudlark Publishing Director Joel Simons negotiated the deal with Northbank’s Diane Banks and Martin Redfern. Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin ’ s War Against Ukraine will be published on 10 November 2022.

Matthews co-wrote the 2015 Russian television series Londongrad and played an episodic role in it. [32] Matthews also played the US Ambassador to Moscow in the 2017 Russian television series The Optimists. [33] I found the book fairly objective, which is a plus point. It oversimplifying to cast Ukraine as the good guys and Russians as the bad guys. Ukraine did have its issues and not everyone is blameless. Most rational people act in rational ways and Putin is no exception, although the invasion turned out to be a catastrophic blunder, and a gross misreading of the situation, he still acted as he did for a reason. That's what Overreach is all about. This then, provides the reader with accounts, quotes and insight from current and former insiders, blended with those of people who fought/are fighting or suffered from Putin's "Limited Special Operation", as the first six months of this war unfolded. Matthews’s analysis of why the invasion has foundered also offers insights. He challenges, for example, the notion of Kyiv’s armed forces as outnumbered amateurs, pointing out that during the last eight years of the simmering Donbas conflict, some 900,000 Ukrainians have served, “making a vast reserve force with recent combat experience”.Even Ukrainian Russian speakers do not like to join Putin’s Russia. After all, they are much richer than the Russians. By mid-March, even Matthews himself has to leave for a while, fearing that his 19-year-old son, a Russian passport holder, may get drafted. Yet amidst this chaos and personal upheaval, he has produced a book that is not merely the first full account of the war, but may set the standard for some time to come.

Putin goes crazy, doing worse things and aggravating the conflict with worse consequences worldwide. A wave of hurriedly written books about the Russo-Ukrainian war is about to crash over our bookshops and overburdened shelves, but it is hard not to feel sorry for most of their authors. Owen Matthews has already come out with what is not only one of the fastest, but also likely to be the best, setting a painfully high benchmark for those who follow. Interesting and well-written book for those who have not observed Russia or Ukraine closely. If you have, this is mainly a repetition of main events without very much new light shed. 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. 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”.An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin's Master Agent (Bloomsbury, 2019) [24] A biography of German Communist spy Richard Sorge, the first English language work written with extensive access to the Soviet archives. Chosen as a Book of the Year by The Economist magazine: "A tragic, heroic story, magnificently told with an understated rage." [25] Bullough, Oliver (18 March 2019). "An Impeccable Spy review – wine, women and state secrets". The Observer. ISSN 0029-7712 . Retrieved 3 August 2019. Owen Matthews writes about Russia for The Spectator and is the author of Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s War Against Ukraine.

Overreach is an important and unparalleled piece of investigative journalism that will be the first to offer readers a panoramic view of how the most serious geopolitical crisis since World War II began – and how its endgame is likely to unfold.The author briefly goes over some key battles such as the one for the Hostomel airport. However, there are few details about other major battles such as the siege of Mariupol and Azovstal. The war crimes at Bucha are covered in more detail including the story of the young Russian soldier that committed war crimes and was subsequently captured and sentenced to life in prison. Various actors in the war such as the foreign volunteers, the Chechens, the Wagner mercenaries are each discussed in turn. Chapter 2 (“And Moscow is Silent”) gives a brief biography of Putin that largely aligns with the conventional Western interpretation. As the Chapter title suggests, much is made of Putin’s distress at the fall of the Soviet Union (Matthews quotes Boris Reitschuster’s claim that the infamous ‘Moscow is silent’ moment is “the key to understanding Putin”) and its development into simmering anti-NATO resentment. The last part of Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 summarise the history of post-USSR, pre-Zelensky Ukraine, including the Euromaidan protests and the subsequent conflict in the Donbas. Drawing on over 25 years’ experience as a correspondent in Moscow, as well as his own family ties to Russia and Ukraine, journalist Owen Matthews takes us through the poisoned historical roots of the conflict, into the Covid bubble where Putin conceived his invasion plans in a fog of paranoia about Western threats, and finally into the inner circle around Ukrainian president and unexpected war hero Volodimir Zelensky.