Vladimir Putin does not want to attack NATO, but he wants to destroy it. What the Russian president is planning: “It’s a long game. He has an advantage”

Politicians say Russia poses the worst threat to European security since World War II, but Russia is weakened by the war in Ukraine and is in no position to attack NATO, experts say. Instead, the Russian president wants to weaken and undermine NATO from within, analysts believe, reports Business Insider.

The era of relative peace and prosperity that the West has enjoyed since the end of World War II may be rapidly coming to an end.

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,” referring to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

It is one of a series of increasingly stark warnings that the war in Ukraine could be the prelude to a much larger conflict.

According to German military documents, Russia was to launch a massive offensive in 2024 to take advantage of declining Western support in Ukraine. The documents, obtained by Bild, then foresee Russia turning its attention to NATO members in Eastern Europe, trying to destabilize its enemies through cyber attacks and internal chaos in the Baltic states: Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia.

Germany is not alone in making such predictions. Late last year, Poland’s national security agency estimated that Russia could attack NATO within three years.

Members of the NATO alliance have sworn to protect each other from attack under 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 actually 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 “nonsense”.

However, Western military chiefs are not convinced. A month earlier, Putin threatened the West with the prospect of a nuclear attack over its support for Ukraine. He alluded to a recent suggestion by French President Emmanuel Macron that NATO could send troops to Ukraine.

Analysts told Business Insider that Russia is weakened by the war in Ukraine and unable to attack the alliance, but Putin is playing a long game, and the outcome of the war in Ukraine and Russia’s long-running attempt to undermine and destroy NATO will be key factors in deciding whether Russia will attack.

Putin has a key advantage over the West, Philip Ingram, a former British military intelligence officer, told BI. While Western leaders plan elections, Putin is an authoritarian leader with no serious opponents. That means he can focus on his future plans.

“He doesn’t want, at this point, a direct confrontation with NATO, but he thinks in a different way and plans in a different way than what we do in the West and therefore the NATO countries do. So he’s not planning to attack NATO next year, but he’s going to set the conditions so he can,” Ingram said.

Putin will try to weaken NATO from within

Analysts like Ingram believe Putin realizes that attacking NATO now would come at a huge price. Instead, Putin will seek to weaken NATO from within to create weak spots that he can strike in the future if he chooses.

To do this, Putin will likely step up Russia’s so-called “hybrid warfare” against NATO countries.

As NATO puts it, hybrid warfare “often takes place in gray areas below the threshold of conventional warfare.”

“The threat posed by Russia to NATO is unlikely to be an invasion, it is more likely to come from a range of other military and non-military threats, i.e. hybrid threats,” said Ruth Deyermond, a Russian military expert at King’s College of London.

A central goal is to distract the US from its commitment to defend its European allies, either by hoping it will engage in another costly military campaign elsewhere or by exhausting the NATO project.

“For this reason, I expect to see Russia using all the tricks and capabilities in its closet to undermine Western unity in the coming years,” Bryden Spurling, an analyst at the RAND Corporation, told BI.

Russia, some point out, is already engaged in a war with NATO, albeit covertly.

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 engaged in a significant conflict with NATO countries and their allies,” he stressed.

The war in Ukraine has exposed serious limits to 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 failed to make up the shortfall, which was felt on the Ukrainian front.

The United States recently approved the aid, but the problems exposed by the situation run deep, said Spurling, the RAND analyst. This, he said, is a weakness that Russia could try to exploit if not fixed.

Any Russian attack on NATO will have a devastating price for Putin

But Russia also faces its own problems.

“It’s hard to imagine a short- to medium-term scenario where the Russian government has the resources to engage in another war on the scale of the one in Ukraine,” said Deyermond, a Russian military expert at King’s College London.

Any potential attack on NATO would come at a devastating price and could jeopardize Putin’s power.

“War with NATO would destroy Russia, as Putin will well know, and even if he thinks there is a possibility that the US might not intervene to defend a NATO member from a Russian invasion, he shows no signs of wanting to find out by playing roulette Russian nuclear,” 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 scout the terrain and be eager to exploit other opportunities to expand Russian power.

“He wants the Soviet Union back in the hands of a Russian leader and that is his ultimate goal,” Ingram concluded.

Publisher: BC

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