No Comforts, Only Truths: Farewell to Janusz Bugajski

Janusz Bugajski spent a lifetime naming autocracy plainly, warning early, and standing with those smeared for reporting. We honour his clarity, courage, and uncompromising standards.

Janusz Bugajski, who died on 18 October 2025¹, spent a lifetime warning that appeasing autocrats only breeds larger catastrophes. He did so not as a professional doomsayer but as a scholar with calloused hands—an analyst shaped by the hard edges of Central and Eastern Europe who refused the euphemisms that cushion Western policy failures. Born in Nantwich in 1954, educated at Kent and the LSE, and later settled in Washington, he moved with ease between think-tanks and television studios, classrooms and congressional hearings. Wherever he stood, he insisted on naming the forces eroding democracy from the Kremlin’s metastasising imperialism to Belgrade’s proxy adventurism and he urged the West to meet them clear-eyed and early, before small lies calcified into larger ones.

In a career that ran through Radio Free Europe, CSIS, CEPA and the Jamestown Foundation, Bugajski became a bridge between rigour and urgency. His output columns, testimonies, long-form studies, was prolific, but volume…