When Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the world was taken by surprise. Yet Western intelligence agencies had long warned that such a war was coming. In this gripping investigation, Katja Gloger and Georg Mascolo show how political leaders ignored these warnings for decades—and how critics of Germany’s Russia policy were sidelined or silenced. Based on previously classified documents and interviews with dozens of eyewitnesses, the authors reconstruct the hidden context of Putin’s much-praised speech before the German Bundestag in 2001. They uncover a secret back channel to the Kremlin involving a former agent of East Germany’s secret police ‘Stasi’, shed light on a little-understood military cooperation between Russia and Germany, and explain why Putin’s nuclear threats ultimately sent a German chancellor on a diplomatic mission halfway around the world.