“Putin has obviously deceived everyone.” These were the words of Manuela Schwesig, First Minister of the German state Mecklenburg- Western Pomerania, after the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. She was trying to explain why her federal government had been so closely implicated in Russia’s controversial completion of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. Why have other German, Austrian and European politicians and commentators so often got it so very wrong in their assessments of Moscow’s policy? Why has the EU been so slow to recognise the danger posed to its liberal values by nationalist autocrats such as Viktor Orbán of Hungary? And why have lessons from past blunders in Western policy—particularly in the Balkans—and the example of German Ostpolitik gone ignored, until it was too late? Paul Lendvai exposes the role of double standards embraced, blind eyes turned and human and political weakness overlooked in policies of appeasement towards Europe’s authoritarian regimes, past and present. Combining analysis of new developments with decades of personal experience as a correspondent, he provides fascinating political profiles in deceit, sketching both the victims and the perpetrators of political fraud in Central and Eastern Europe. PAUL LENDVAI was born in Budapest in 1929. He began his journalism career writing for social democratic newspapers in Hungary. Due to increasing political pressure following the Hungarian Revolution he immigrated to Vienna in 1957 where he continued his work as journalist specializing in Eastern European affairs. He served as the Eastern European correspondent for Die Presse and the Financial Times for twenty-two years. He contributed to the British newspaper The Economist and wrote columns for Austrian, German, and Swiss newspapers and radio stations. In 1982, he became editor-in-chief of the Eastern Europe department at the ORF public broadcasting company. Since 2003 the newspaper Der Standard is publishing a weekly column by Paul Lendvai.
