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.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

The Russian enigma

Enforced brevity focuses the mind wonderfully. And when the minds in question are two of the West’s most interesting historians of Russia, the result is a distillation of insight that’s vitally timely. Sir Rodric Braithwaite was Britain’s ambassador to Moscow from 1988-92 during the collapse of the USSR (where he was the boss of Christopher Steele, of Trump dossier fame), then chaired the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee. He went on to write the brilliant Afgantsy, a history of the USSR’s disastrous Afghan war and its impact on the Soviet Union’s collapse, and Moscow 1941, a people’s history of the heroic Soviet fight against Nazism.

Thursday

Owen Matthews

A Russian visa ban would delight Putin

Do you hate Russia, or do you hate Putin? That’s the central question behind a current debate about whether to suspend tourist visas to the EU for all Russian citizens. Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky started the ball rolling last week in an interview with the Washington Post, where he said that the 'most important sanction' that the EU could impose on Russia was to 'close the borders, because the Russians are taking away someone else’s land'. He added that Russians should 'live in their own world until they change their philosophy.

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Sanctions are working – whatever Putin says

Don’t believe Vladimir Putin’s hype. The Russian economy is not OK. With western sanctions jeopardising up to 40 per cent of the country’s GDP, Putin’s assurances of an economic pivot to the East are a sham. And his weaponising of gas supplies to Europe is the financial equivalent of strapping on a suicide vest. That, roughly, is the message of a major new study published last week by the Yale School of Management about the impact of sanctions on Russia. Yale, working with a team of international economists, has looked past a wall of Russian obfuscation and used real-world data from retailers, energy traders and investors to reveal a picture very different from the rosy image presented by Putin at the St Petersburg Economic Forum in June.

Thursday

Owen Matthews

How Russia is holding Ukraine’s wheat exports to ransom

Starvation is a weapon as old as war itself. But Vladimir Putin has put a perversely postmodern twist on the ancient stratagem. Instead of menacing his Ukrainian enemy with hunger and poverty, he is threatening the whole world. Putin has long used oil and gas as a political instrument, most recently cutting off supplies to Poland and Bulgaria in retaliation for their refusal to pay their bills in roubles. But it is Putin’s blockade of the export of Ukrainian wheat that could prove just as effective in Russia’s war of weaponised commodities. Together, Russia and Ukraine produce 30 per cent of the global wheat exports. Ukraine is the world’s sixth biggest exporter of grains, almost all of it through seven Black Sea ports from Odessa to Mariupol.

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Zelensky’s choice

31 min listen

This week Lara Prendergast and William Moore talk to James Forsyth and the academic, Dr Alexander Clarkson about Zelensky's possible path to peace (00:42). Followed by Owen Matthews, The Spectator's Russia correspondent on Turkey's power over Nato expansion (13:28). Finally, a chat between two bowls fanatics, Michael Simmons, The Spectator's data journalist and Andrew Gibson from the bowls green in Streatham (22:00).Hosted by Lara Prendergast & William MooreProduced by Sam HolmesSubscribe to The Spectator today and get a £20 Amazon gift voucher: spectator.

Owen Matthews

Cold Turkey: why is Erdogan resisting Nato’s expansion?

Driving a hard bargain is the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s chief survival skill – one that has kept him in power for nearly as long as his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. And the basic principles of bargaining are twofold: never give something away for nothing, and make your threats to walk away convincing. No surprise, then, that Erdogan’s buzz-killing announcement last week that Turkey would oppose Swedish and Finnish membership of Nato was made in characteristically blunt terms. Speaking of a planned visit of Nordic diplomats to Ankara, Erdogan asked: ‘Are they coming to convince us? Excuse me, but they should not tire themselves.

Thursday

Owen Matthews

The new White Russians: the fate of émigrés fleeing Putin

It’s spring in Tbilisi. The fruit trees are in full blossom, the nights are warm. The Purpur restaurant near the Gudiashvili Gardens and Vinzavod No. 1 on Rustaveli Avenue – favourites of visiting Moscow hipsters and creatives for years – buzz with Russian conversation. ‘Everyone I know is here now,’ says Katya, 43, a museum curator visiting from Moscow. ‘It’s like Kvartira 44 [a Moscow café popular with the intelligentsia] on an outing.’ But instead of excitement, the mood among the thousands of Russians who have fled their country for the Georgian capital since the beginning of the war is one of anxiety and barely suppressed desperation.

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Cross to bear

40 min listen

In this week’s episode: How are the people of both Russia and Ukraine processing the war? Our Russia correspondent Owen Matthews writes in this week’s Spectator that he has been stunned at how easily some of his Russian friends have accepted the Kremlin’s propaganda. He joins the podcast to explain why he thinks this is, followed by journalist and author of This Is Not Propaganda, Peter Pomerantsev, who has travelled to Kyiv to celebrate the festival of Passover. (00:48) Also this week: Is Rishi Sunak politically incompetent? Until recently Rishi Sunak was a favourite to succeed Boris Johnson, but this week his popularity plummeted to new lows.

Owen Matthews

Putin’s war is a cross to bear for all Russians

‘The photographs of murdered civilians, their hands tied behind their backs, shot in the head and tossed like animals on to the street… we will not forget, and no one will let us forget,’ wrote Russian journalist and author Yevgenia Albats last week. ‘The guilt for this will lie on our children and grandchildren. Bucha, Irpin, Motyzhin – we will now have to live with them for ever.’ Powerful words and moving nostra culpa for Russian atrocities in Ukraine. But they raise a vital question. Who, exactly, is the ‘we’ who is to bear the blame, guilt and punishment? All Russians? The 70 per cent of Russians who official polls claim actively support the war? Russian soldiers responsible for the atrocities?

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Turkey’s dilemma

39 min listen

In this week’s episode: could President Erdogan broker a peace deal between Putin and the West?  For this week’s cover piece, Owen Matthews has written about how Turkey’s President Erdogan became a key powerbroker between Vladimir Putin and the Western alliance. On the podcast, Owen is joined by Ece Temelkuran, a political thinker, author, and writer of the book How to Lose a Country. (1:13)Also this week: a look at Tina, the drug devastating the gay community.Dr Max Pemberton has written about Tina, a dangerous drug often used at chemsex parties. Max joins us now along with Philip Hurd, a chemsex rehabilitation professional and trustee of Controlling Chemsex. (14:02)And finally: Are The Oscars losing their relevance?

Owen Matthews

Turkey’s dilemma: whose side is Erdogan on?

Istanbul Vladimir Putin’s ill-conceived blitzkrieg in Ukraine has failed thanks, first and foremost, to the guts of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians. British and US-supplied anti-tank weapons have played a crucial role, too. But it’s Ukraine’s Turkish--made TB2 Bayraktar drones that have been the war’s most unexpectedly effective weapon. Unexpected not just because of their battlefield killing power but because the father-in-law of the TB2’s inventor and manufacturer is Recep Tayyip Erdogan – the only European leader to have once described himself as a friend of Vladimir Putin. Erdogan, with a foot in the East and West, has emerged as the war’s key power-broker – and his loyalty is being actively courted by both Moscow and Washington.

Thursday

Owen Matthews

My one-way ticket out of Moscow

Things fall apart. Moscow friends call to say that I have to urgently send my 19-year-old son out of Russia. He is travelling on his Russian passport and a new law says that he is obliged to register for the military draft. Nikita is on a gap year working at a Moscow theatre and he begs not to be sent away. I dismiss the warnings. A day later, a friend’s nanny shows up at our door and hands me an inch-thick packet of high-denomination euros to take out of the country for her employer. The money’s owner is already en route to Israel on a private jet. I overrule my son and open up Skyscanner. Europe, the US and Canada have closed their airspace to Russian planes and the Kremlin has reciprocated. Istanbul is the only European destination still accepting flights from Moscow.

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Putin’s rage

38 min listen

In this week’s episode: What’s the mood on the ground in Ukraine and Russia?For this week’s cover piece, Owen Matthews asks whether the invasion of Ukraine will mean the end of Putin’s regime. And in this week’s Spectator diary, Freddy Gray reports on pride and paranoia on the streets of Lviv. They join the podcast, to talk about Russia’s future and Ukraine’s present. (00:49)Also this week: Is Germany ready to tackle its dependence on Russian gas?In response to Russia’s invasion, Germany has abandoned its Nord Stream 2 pipeline, sent lethal weapons to Ukraine and, most strikingly of all, has committed to the Nato target of spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence - a €100 billion fund.

Owen Matthews

Putin’s rage: the Russian President won’t be easy to topple

 Moscow How will Vladimir Putin’s hold on power end? Will he be quietly retired by Kremlin rivals angry at a national humiliation, like Nikita Khrushchev after the debacle of the Cuban missile crisis? Deposed by KGB men even more hawkish than himself, like Mikhail Gorbachev? Overthrown by a popular revolt, like Tsar Nicholas II? Or will he die in his bed still the undisputed tyrant of a police state, like Joseph Stalin? Prediction has become a risky business in Russia ever since Putin threw his usual calculation and caution to the wind and launched a rash and fundamentally unwinnable war against Ukraine.

Sunday

Owen Matthews

Will western sanctions really hurt Putin?

Boris Johnson has announced that the UK will impose personal sanctions on Vladimir Putin and his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov – and is as drawing up a ‘hit list’ of Russian oligarchs to target. ‘We have to make it deeply painful for the oligarchs that support the Putin regime,’ said foreign secretary Liz Truss. ‘There are over a hundred Russian billionaires … We will come after you.’ Will such actions actually work? For many top Russians, they are a badge of honour. ‘What? You haven’t been sanctioned yet?’ asked one Russian senator of the head of a Duma committee during a break in a Russian television show on which I was also a guest in 2019. ‘What kind of patriot are you?

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Ukraine under siege – what now?

15 min listen

Vladimir Putin has launched an attack on multiple fronts across Ukraine. In a televised speech, the Russian leader announced a 'military operation' in Ukraine's Donbas region.Today, Boris Johnson has vowed to hit Russia with a 'massive' package of sanctions. But who will really suffer from these sanctions? And will it be enough to deter stop Putin in his tracks?All to be discussed as Katy Balls speaks to James Forsyth and Owen Matthews, The Spectator's Russia correspondent.

Owen Matthews

Has Putin lost the plot?

Sitting alone at the end of an absurdly long table or marooned behind a vast desk in a palatial hall, Vladimir Putin’s idea of social distancing has gone beyond the paranoid and into the realm of the deranged. His distance from reason and reality seems to have gone the same way. In little more than 48 hours, Putin’s sensible, peace-talking statesman act flipped into something dark and irrational that has worried even his supporters. As Putin’s hour-long address announcing official recognition of the breakaway republics of Donbas went out on Monday, a producer on Kremlin-controlled TV texted me: ‘Boss okhuyel [the boss has wigged out].’ Indeed.

Thursday

Owen Matthews

The western press is giving Putin what he wants

Why does Vladimir Putin need Russia Today and Sputnik News when the western media are doing such a great job on his behalf? Throughout his two decades in power, Putin has yearned for international respect. Failing that, he’ll settle for fear. And what more satisfying outcome could there be for a serial sabre-rattler like Putin to have his bluff finally taken seriously? For weeks, British papers and TV have been filled with images of scary Russian tanks, warships and artillery blasting away — mostly provided, if you check the photo credits, by Russia’s Ministry of Defence. Since November, the US and British governments have been issuing increasingly strident warnings that Putin is preparing an imminent and massive attack on Ukraine.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

How western journalists became Putin propagandists

Why does Vladimir Putin need Russia Today and Sputnik News when the western media are doing such a great job on his behalf? Throughout his two decades in power, Putin has yearned for international respect. Failing that, he’ll settle for fear. And what more satisfying outcome could there be for a serial sabre-rattler like Putin to have his bluff finally taken seriously? For weeks, British papers and TV have been filled with images of scary Russian tanks, warships and artillery blasting away — mostly provided, if you check the photo credits, by Russia’s Ministry of Defence. Since November, the US and British governments have been issuing increasingly strident warnings that Putin is preparing an imminent and massive attack on Ukraine.

Thursday

Owen Matthews

The phoney war

39 min listen

In this week’s episode: Will Putin invade Ukraine? For this week’s cover story, Owen Matthews argues that if Putin is going to invade Ukraine, he will do so later rather than sooner. He joins the podcast, along with Julius Strauss who reports on the mood in Odessa for this week’s magazine. (00:42)Also this week: Is Brexit working?This week marks the second anniversary of Brexit. But how successful has it been? Joining the podcast to answer that question is Lord Frost who was Chief Negotiator of Task Force Europe from January 2020 until his resignation in December last year - and the journalist Ed West, who runs the Substack, Wrong Side of History (13:12)And finally: What is the allure of a classified ad?