In March, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Europe was in a “pre-war” era and that Russia must not defeat Ukraine for the continent’s security.
“I don’t want to scare anyone, but war is no longer a concept of the past,” Tusk said in an interview with several European media outlets. “It is real. In fact, it already started more than two years ago,” Tusk said, referring to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
This is one of a series of increasingly stark warnings that the war in Ukraine could be the prelude to a much larger conflict.
German military planning documents leaked in January envisioned Russia launching a massive offensive in 2024 to take advantage of waning Western support for Ukraine.
The documents, obtained by Bild, then showed that Russia turned its sights on NATO members in Eastern Europe, seeking to destabilize its enemies through cyber attacks and internal chaos in the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia.
Germany is not the only one considering such a scenario. Late last year, Poland’s national security agency estimated that Russia could attack NATO within three years.
NATO members, 32 in number, have each sworn to protect each other against attack, according to Article 5 of the Washington Treaty. That means a Russian attack on one member could trigger a war involving several nuclear-armed states.
But whether Putin really intends to attack NATO and what an attack might look like remains unclear.
In March, Putin denied that he had plans to attack NATO members, describing such claims as “complete nonsense.”
However, Western military chiefs are not convinced. A month earlier, Putin had threatened the West with the prospect of a nuclear attack over its support for Ukraine.
The Russian leader was alluding to a recent suggestion by French President Emmanuel Macron that NATO could send troops to Ukraine to support its fight against the Russian invasion.
Analysts told Business Insider that Russia is weakened by the toll of the war in Ukraine and is in no position to attack the Alliance.
But Putin is playing a long-term game, and the outcome of the war in Ukraine and Russia’s long-standing attempt to undermine and corrupt NATO will be key factors in deciding whether Russia will strike or not.
Putin is plotting to weaken NATO
Vladimir Putin has a key advantage over the West, Philip Ingram, a former British military intelligence officer, told Business Insider.
While Western leaders plan around four-year election cycles, Putin is an authoritarian leader with no serious domestic political opponents. That means he can look decades ahead.
“He doesn’t want, at this point, a direct confrontation with NATO,” Ingram said. “But Putin thinks in a different way and plans in a different way to us in the West, and therefore to the way NATO countries do it.”
“So his growing ambition will not be to attack NATO and NATO countries next year. But he will set the conditions to be able to do that,” Ingram said.
Analysts like Ingram believe that Putin realizes that attacking NATO now would have a vast and punitive cost to Russia. Instead, Putin will seek to weaken NATO from within to create weak points that he can attack in the future if he chooses.
To do so, Putin is likely to step up Russia’s so-called “hybrid war” against NATO countries.
As NATO puts it, hybrid warfare “often takes place in gray areas, below the threshold of conventional warfare.”
“The instruments or tools used and fused together to trigger hybrid warfare are often difficult to discern, attribute and corroborate.”
These can include spreading conspiracy theories and disinformation, fueling extremist parties in certain countries, fueling terrorist threats, and launching cyber attacks to undermine the foundation of Western societies.
“The threat that Russia poses to NATO is unlikely to be an invasion, it is more likely to come from a range of other military and non-military threats – what are often called hybrid threats,” Ruth Deyermond, told BI expert on the Russian military at Kings College London.
A central goal is to tear the US out of its commitment to defend its European allies, either hoping it will be embroiled in another costly military campaign elsewhere or grow weary of the NATO project.
“For this reason, I expect to see Russia using all the tricks and capabilities available to undermine Western unity in the coming years,” Bryden Spurling, an analyst at the RAND Corporation, told BI.
A covert war is already underway
Russia, some point out, is already engaged in a war with NATO, albeit covertly.
Just days ago, a group of men in the UK were accused of carrying out arson attacks on a Ukraine-linked business on behalf of Russian intelligence. This is just one example of “hybrid warfare” tactics.
In recent months, Russia has also been accused of being behind the jamming of GPS navigation systems of aircraft in northern Europe and the Baltic countries, in what some say could be part of a “hybrid warfare” attack “.
Robert Dover, a professor of international security at Britain’s University of Hull, said the question of whether Russia would attack NATO is already redundant. “Russia is already involved in a significant conflict with NATO countries and their allies,” he pointed out.
The war in Ukraine exposed the serious limits of NATO’s military power. The alliance struggled to produce enough artillery shells and ammunition for Ukraine.
During the recent US aid freeze, European NATO countries were unable to make up the shortfall, and Ukrainian forces were outnumbered 10 to 1 on parts of the front line that were close to collapse.
The U.S. has recently unblocked aid, but the problems the situation has exposed run deep, said Spurling, the RAND analyst. This, he said, is a weakness that Russia could try to exploit if not fixed.
“This conflict has revealed how ill-prepared Western armies are for a war that is not on their terms,” he added. “While we maintain this fragility, there is a greater risk that Russia will think it can test its strength,” he said.
Russia is weakened by the war in Ukraine
But Russia also faces massive problems of its own. His army was devastated by the invasion of Ukraine. According to US estimates, its entire pre-war invasion force of around 300,000 men was killed or wounded (although it redacted these figures), its stock of armored vehicles was devastated, and its commanders steadily took bad decisions.
“It is hard to imagine a short- to medium-term scenario in which the Russian government would have the resources to engage in another war on a similar scale to the one in Ukraine,” Deyermond, a Russian military expert at the Kings College London.
Any potential attack against NATO would have such a devastating cost that it could jeopardize Putin’s grip on power.
“A war with NATO would destroy Russia, as Putin will well know, and even if he believes there is a possibility that the US might not intervene to defend a fellow NATO member from a Russian invasion, he shows no signs of wanting to know playing nuclear Russian roulette,” Deyermond said.
But however long it takes, Putin is determined to achieve some form of victory in Ukraine so he can use it as a platform to plan Russia’s next campaign, Ingram said.
After Ukraine, Putin will survey the terrain and be eager to exploit other opportunities to expand Russian power.
As Ingram says: “He wants the Soviet Union back in the hands of a Russian leader, and that is his ultimate goal.”
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