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. collapse in relations. Military flashpoints have increased in number and frequency, and rather than acting as trade partners, the two countries view economic competition in zero-sum terms. As Shirk notes, China and the United States have become so fearful of one another that they are weaponizing 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. The noted conservative economist delivers arguments both fiscal and political against social justice initiatives such as welfare and a federal minimum wage.

Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise - Goodreads

An insider’s account of the rampant misconduct within the Trump administration, including the tumult surrounding the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. But in the real world the US and its ally the United Kingdom are arming Australia with nuclear subs to police the South China Sea. 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. What I admire most about the author’s writing in this book is it’s remarkable frankness. He does not try to achieve fake “balance” by making the Ukrainian Government sound as bad as the Russian Government. But what all sides overlook and their genuine mistakes are on full display and are carefully and shrewdly observed.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. Nuclear scientist and Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov later credited Dubcek with the birth of dissent in the Soviet Soviet Union and made possible Gorbachev’s perestroika and the breakup of the Soviet union. Putin goes crazy, doing worse things and aggravating the conflict with worse consequences worldwide. Of course, history tells us that whenever one great power’s influence is fading and a rival’s is growing, conflict is inevitable. But the competition doesn’t necessarily require military action. Yet the risk of a military clash between the US and China has grown markedly over the past two decades. Certainly, the US shares some responsibility for this shift. But, as Dr. Shirk makes clear, a series of missteps in Chinese policy—none of them inevitable—has been the determining factor. And the first of those missteps predated the ascension of Xi Jinping by a decade. It was under his predecessor as General Secretary, Hu Jintao, that the pattern was set. And in Overreach, the author explains how this new course in Chinese foreign and military policy emerged from the bureaucratic muddle at the top of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

OVERREACH | Kirkus Reviews OVERREACH | Kirkus Reviews

Measured against this standard, and considering the circumstances under which it was produced, the book is a success. Part 1 covers the historical origins of the 2022 invasion, stretching from Kyivan Rus��� to the election of Volodymyr Zelensky as President of Ukraine in 2019. Chapter 1 (“Poisoned Roots”) is necessarily concise and touches lightly, if at all, on many of the controversies of early Russian and Ukrainian history, but Matthews does a good job emphasising the fundamental uncertainty of key issues.

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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. 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.

overreach - Wiktionary, the free dictionary overreach - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

Putin is totally weakened: perhaps it would be the best result for the West, the bad thing is that Russia is leaving more and more of the international concert and this is bad for the world in general and especially for the Russians.Even Ukrainian Russian speakers do not like to join Putin’s Russia. After all, they are much richer than the Russians. 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. The central argument of this book is that China’s peaceful rise has been derailed largely for reasons to do with it’s internal politics, but exacerbated by the world (particularly the US) reacting to it.

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

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?” 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? their interdependence. Not even the common threat of the COVID-19 pandemic could convince them to coordinate their efforts. As we near the first anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine the inevitable flood of books begin in earnest. Of this first draft of history Owen Matthews contribution stands head and shoulders above the rest.

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Written at what must have been hypersonic speed, Overreach is a remarkable achievement, with Matthews’s expert eye like an all-seeing drone buzzing from one side of the conflict to the other. We drop in everywhere from Putin’s long white table to Zelensky’s bunker, via the siege of Kyiv and the trenches of Mariupol. expand soft and hard power abroad. Prior to the global financial crisis in 2008, China seemed willing to engage with domestic and international issues in a constructive manner. Following the crisis, however, power dynamics shifted, and so, too, did China's approach. It began to view the U.S. as a 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. 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.