How the West misunderstood Russia’s military capabilities 

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 They will eventually be superseded by the scholarly histories.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’.