Owen Matthews

Owen Matthews

Owen Matthews is an Associate Editor of The Spectator and the author of Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s war on Ukraine.

Friday

Owen Matthews

The UN is no longer a forum for international peace

Should Russia’s aggressive war on Ukraine, with its accompanying litany of horrific human rights abuses, disqualify it from a seat on the United Nations’ Security Council (UNSC)? That’s what Poland’s feisty foreign minister Radek Sikorsky called for yesterday in New York. The UNSC was meant to be a 'guardian of peace, not to give immunity to aggressors' like Russia, Sikorski told Polish television. More, he called the legal basis for Russia’s permanent seat at the Security Council table – with its accompanying veto over all resolutions – 'questionable' because Moscow took over the USSR’s old seat without a vote.  In moral terms, Sikorski has a point – and it’s one that the Ukrainians have been pushing for a while.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

Why Putin is unlikely to attend the Miami G20

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has today announced that the US has invited Vladimir Putin to an upcoming G20 summit in Miami, giving the Russian leader “an opportunity to engage not just with Trump, but with other world leaders.” In one sense, the invitation is an olive branch to Moscow from Washington, so far the only Western nation willing to engage in peace talks with Putin. On the other, it’s a poisoned chalice that the Kremlin has already signaled that Putin will probably not accept.  For one, the summit will be held on Trump’s home turf – quite literally, as the venue is the Trump-owned Doral golf resort near Miami. When they met on a US Air Force base in Anchorage, Alaska, last year the two leaders were on more-or-less neutral ground.

putin

Monday

Owen Matthews

Ukraine is losing the war

Vladimir Putin has not changed his war aims a jot since 2022 and remains determined on fighting on. Donald Trump has no new plan for peace other than bringing the Ukraine war to an end on Putin’s terms. And Kyiv is running out of money and men to defend itself, just as surely as it has already run out of Patriot interceptors to defend its skies against the Kremlin’s barrages. Those are the three depressing takeaways from the latest round of shuttle diplomacy in Moscow and Kyiv by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff. On the eve of their departure, Trump said his boys would be presenting “a new plan” for Ukraine. It quickly became clear that no such initiative existed.

Tuesday

Owen Matthews

The decadent joy of a forgotten hotel

From our UK edition

Rich people can be awful. Nowhere is this more true than in their unnatural habitat – the luxury hotel. There’s only one thing worse than tourists, and that’s wealthy, entitled tourists with their bratty kids and whiny complaints. How to enjoy the world of luxury travel while avoiding the luxury travellers? Easy. Go to blighted, war-torn, no-longer-fashionable places once bathed in dosh and celebrity but which now lie neglected and forgotten, washed up by the currents of history. Doubtless there is something decadent and orientalist about loving sad, forgotten old hotels My favourite and archetype of such places is the Splendid Hotel on Buyukada, an island in the Sea of Marmara an hour’s ferry ride from Istanbul.

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Why did the CIA director fly to Moscow?

Gus Carter is joined by Owen Matthews, the Spectator's Russia writer, to discuss John Ratcliffe's unannounced trip to Moscow, where the CIA director met Russia's foreign intelligence chief but not Putin. Owen runs through the possible reasons: Iran, a suspected Russian provocation against NATO, and the stalled peace process. They also discuss the sabotage campaign across Europe and the sanctions bill that could hurt Russia more than anything Trump has tried. Learn how to earn yield on gold, paid in gold, at Monetary-Metals.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

What was the CIA doing in Moscow?

Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe paid an unannounced visit to Moscow yesterday, spending eight hours in the Russian capital before returning to the US. Though he visited the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied that they had met – though Ratcliffe certainly spoke to his counterpart Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s SVR external intelligence service, and other top Russian security officials.  The list of topics urgent enough to prompt the first personal visit of a US cabinet-level official to the Kremlin in six months is short.

Monday

Owen Matthews

Storm Shadow missiles won’t change the Ukraine war

From our UK edition

Andrew Burnham, in his first foray into international statesmanship, today appeared as guest of honour at Independence Day celebrations in Kyiv with a rousing message of support for Ukraine. ‘My nation kept the flame of European freedom alive in the 20th century, you hold that flame in the 21st,’ Burnham said in a speech in front of Kyiv’s ancient St Sophia cathedral. ‘Despite Russia’s outrageous threats to my country, we will continue our support for Ukraine.’ In addition to words, Burnham came bearing practical gifts in the form of blueprints that will allow the Ukrainians to assemble their own version of the UK/French Scalp-Storm Shadow ballistic missile.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

Are Ukraine’s deep strikes simply strengthening Putin’s hand?

From our UK edition

Are Ukraine’s deep strikes against Russia helping Kyiv win the war or strengthening the hand of Kremlin hardliners? Since early summer, an escalating barrage by Ukrainian long-range drones and cruise missiles have devastated oil refineries, sunk or damaged more than 220 ships in the Black Sea and burned at least a dozen large warehouses of Russia’s Wildberries online retail chain. The result has been a nationwide fuel crisis and deepening economic pain. For millions of ordinary Russians, the conflict has finally moved off the television screen and into their daily lives. In public, Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stated that he’s not for turning. The purpose of Ukrainian deep strikes is to ‘undermine our confidence in ourselves and our capabilities’, he told state TV last month.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

Who gets to decide when assassination is justified?

When is extrajudicial killing just war by other means, and when does it become a state-sponsored act of terror? ‘We were not terrorists but fighters for freedom who fought with our eyes open,’ Menachem Begin wrote of Irgun, the irregular group of fighters he led during the 1947-48 civil war in Mandatory Palestine, the tactics of whom included bombings and assassinations. But where does the 1 August bombing of the Balzi Rossi restaurant in central Moscow – which killed at least five people and injured more than 20– stand on the scale? Some would describe the attack as a legitimate military operation. The bomb targeted the lavish birthday celebrations of Colonel-General Aleksandr Chayko, Commander-in-Chief of Russia’s Aerospace Forces (whose son-in-law died in the blast).

Monday

Owen Matthews

Why my father would have seen through Arday’s nonsense

From our UK edition

My father would have some hard words for ex-Professor Jason Arday, the serial fantasist poster cry-bully of our times, and his self-righteous claque of academic supporters. The old man’s qualifications as an Arday denier would be twofold. One, he spent his academic career studying class and society in the USSR (Privilege in the Soviet Union was the title of his most successful book). Second, as a man who made his own meteoric way from a hovel in South Wales to Oxford and then the Foreign Office, and as a member of an ethnic minority to boot, my father would have a few things to say to Arday about the realities of British social mobility and the mechanisms of oppression.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

A grim turning point has been reached in Russia’s war on Ukraine

An important turning point has been reached in Russia’s war on Ukraine. But unfortunately for Kyiv, it’s not the ‘tide is turning’ in Ukraine’s favour narrative that Volodymyr Zelensky has been pushing ever since his long-range drone attacks began smashing oil refineries and logistics warehouses deep inside Russia and sinking dozens of ships in the Sea of Azov. Rather, last night not one of the 27 ballistic missiles fired by Russia at and around Kyiv was shot down. At least seventeen people were killed and a series of huge warehouses and major Ukrainian retail outlets were devastated.

Tuesday

Owen Matthews

Two wars are becoming one

Alarmed western observers are warning that the wars in Ukraine and Iran could merge into a single region-wide conflict. Ukrainian drones struck an Iranian oil platform, a Russian missile boat, and sanctioned cargo ships in the Caspian Sea late last month. But in truth, Kyiv has regarded Iran as a combatant in the Ukraine war since the summer of 2022, when the first Shahed drones arrived in Russian-occupied Crimea and Kherson. These drones were accompanied by instructors from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who trained Russian operators in their use. Moreover, this was not even Ukraine’s first strike on an Iranian target in the Caspian.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

Is Zelensky more focused on his survival than Ukraine’s victory?

On the face of it, Volodymyr Zelensky’s firing last week of his popular 35-year-old Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov was an inexplicable own-goal. As Minister for Digital Transformation, Fedorov led Ukraine’s push towards massive drone production. As Defence Minister since January 2026, he was widely credited with Ukraine turning the tables on Russia with long-range drone strikes and for cutting corruption in the military. Now, after a week of protests that saw thousands of young protesters take to the streets in Kyiv, Zelensky has fired Chief of the General Staff, Oleksandr Syrskyi, too.

Tuesday

Owen Matthews

Do Iran’s negotiators speak for the IRGC?

The infamous "Memorandum of Understanding" between the United States and Iran has broken down. One of the major points of failure has been the disagreement over which side controls the Strait of Hormuz.  Yesterday, President Donald Trump abruptly declared that his country should now be known as “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT" and "as such, as a matter of fairness, will be reimbursed at the rate of 20 percent on all cargo shipped." "POTUS is absolutely right," replied Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, on X. "Whoever provides secure and safe passage of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz should be compensated for this service. Iran has always been the GUARDIAN of the Strait and will remain so FOREVER. 20 percent is of course too much. We will be fair.

Friday

Owen Matthews

The Chinese plot to destroy Musk’s Starlink satellites

From our UK edition

Does China have a plan to destroy Starlink, the low-earth orbit satellite system which provides internet connectivity to tens of millions of people – including Ukraine’s military? That is just one of the extraordinary revelations in a year-long investigation by the Insider, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde. Their report is based on a set of power-point presentations from a secret 2023 Russo-Chinese military conference, as well as a working protocol from negotiations held in Moscow in June 2023, that were leaked last year to the German magazine Der Spiegel. This confidential material appears to provide detailed evidence that military cooperation between Moscow and Beijing is far closer and deeper than previously understood.

Tuesday

Owen Matthews

What Trump and Erdoğan want from each other

Donald Trump has made it clear that he’s attending this year's NATO summit in Ankara for one reason only: “respect for President Erdoğan.” Trump told NATO’s Secretary General Mark Rutte last month that if it hadn’t been for the veteran Turkish President’s invitation, “I don't think I would have gone to it.” NATO’s summit will, therefore, be dominated by the alliance’s two most militarily powerful and at the same time most problematic members. Trump seems set on pursuing his long-held goal of making Europe pay for its own defense, while Erdoğan is determined to leverage his strategic relationship with the US, Russia and Ukraine to scrap restrictions on Turkish purchases of US military hardware.

erdoğan

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

Putin has lost touch with reality

From our UK edition

As dark clouds of burning oil billow like thunderheads on the skyline of Moscow and black rain falls across the capital, why does Vladimir Putin fail to see that something fundamental is changing in the dynamic of his war? Why, when Donald Trump effectively agreed to hand over every inch of the Ukrainian territory Russia has captured and offered the Kremlin an easy off-ramp studded with juicy business deals, did Putin refuse? And why, for that matter, did the Russian President choose to launch his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the first place? One answer is that Tsar Vladimir is mad, so blinded by his imperialist ambitions that he deliberately chooses to ignore the reality of a crashing economy, half a million dead fellow countrymen and a war that is obviously unwinnable.

Tuesday

Owen Matthews

The conspiracy of silence surrounding the Nord Stream bombings

From our UK edition

Six months after undersea explosions ripped through three of the four Nord Stream gas pipelines between Russia and Germany I wrote a 2,500-word story for The Spectator entitled ‘Were Ukrainians behind the Nord Stream bombings?’ Citing senior European security sources, the piece revealed a conspiracy of silence – for fear of an anti-Ukraine backlash – by western intelligence agencies, law enforcement authorities and government to cover up what they all knew to be the truth. Forensic evidence and a German police investigation had disclosed that pipelines carrying the Russian gas on which the economies of Germany and many other European countries depended had been blown up by a tiny team of Ukrainian saboteurs.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

Chinese puzzle or matryoshka doll – the complexity of Sino-Russia relations

China and Russia are twins. Both are great Asian land empires; both are continental, multi-ethnic powers that expanded by pushing forward their borders rather than by crossing oceans; both have a deep tradition of autocracy that survives to this day; and both (more plausibly in China’s case) believe that their social contract, ideology and system of government is a universal one superior to all others. In Entangled Empires, the German historians Sören Urbansky and Martin Wagner explore the convoluted story of Russo-Chinese relations from the moment in the mid-17th century that roving Cossack bands bumped up against Siberian tribes who owed fealty to Beijing up to the latest performative amity between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

Sunday

Owen Matthews

Starmer’s Russian oil tanker raid was a political stunt

From our UK edition

This morning, in a blaze of publicity, Royal Navy commandos boarded a sanctioned oil tanker in the English channel in a move that No. 10 heralded as a blow against Vladimir Putin's war machine. It's good, of course, that for the first time in the war the British government has followed the example of the French and finally taken action. However, the boarding of the 107,000 ton Smyrtos has much more to do with political theatre than with actually strangling Russia’s economy.  The boarding of the Smyrtos has much more to do with political theatre than with strangling Russia’s economy  Though you’d never know it from statements from No.10 or Labour ministers, transporting and selling Russian oil is not in itself illegal.