Richard Sakwa is Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. After graduating in History from the London School of Economics, he took a PhD from the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Birmingham. He held lectureships at the Universities of Essex and California, Santa Cruz, before joining the University of Kent in 1987. He has written widely on comparative politics, international relations and political philosophy, with a focus on Russian and European affairs. His latest books are The Putin Paradox (Bloomsbury, 2020), Deception: Russiagate and the New Cold War (Lexington Books, 2022), The Russia Scare: Fake News and Genuine Threat (Routledge, 2022), The Lost Peace: How We Failed to Prevent a Second Cold War (Yale University Press, 2023) and The Culture of the Second Cold War (Anthem Press, 2025).