New assessments of Russia’s military capabilities and its threats to Nato’s security have led to a rising drumbeat of warnings from western governments and pressure to invest more heavily in defence.
“We are living in truly dangerous times [and] at a point when large-scale conflict is more likely than it has been in recent history,” said a British military intelligence official.
Russia’s bellicose “intent is still there”, said a second UK defence official. “Its land forces have been degraded in Ukraine, but its air force and navy are largely intact, and Russia is still a major nuclear power.”
That warning hangs over the Munich Security Conference which starts on Friday, an annual gathering of security, military and intelligence officials and experts that provides a snapshot of the global defence picture at a time of record instability.
One reason for western officials’ alarm is Russia’s revival of its industrial defence machine over the past year, which took place at a speed many in the west had thought impossible.
Russia churned out 4mn artillery shells and several hundred tanks during the year. It will recruit another 400,000 men this year without resorting to full-scale mobilisation, Ukrainian officials forecast.
At the same time, Nato’s own future has been cast into doubt by the prospect of Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Trump last weekend said he would “encourage” Russia to attack any Nato member that failed to reach the alliance’s target of defence spending of 2 per cent of gross domestic product.
European Nato member states have increased their defence spending by about a third over the past decade, with some countries increasing their spending significantly since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
While Russia’s army is heavily deployed in Ukraine and has suffered huge losses during two years of conflict, most western officials expect that it would be able to reconstitute its forces within five to six years.
“We know that adversaries are always looking at new ways to conduct war,” UK defence secretary Grant Shapps told reporters on Thursday. “That’s why we need to be on our mettle. That’s why we need to be ready.”
Other western defence officials in recent weeks have issued an unprecedented number of public warnings of the possibility of a broader conflict in Europe with a more confident and rearmed Russia.
Denmark’s defence minister Troels Lund Poulsen said last week that Russia could test Nato’s mutual defence clause “within a three to five-year period”. That followed similar warnings from colleagues from Sweden, the UK, Romania, Germany and senior officials at Nato itself since the start of the year.
“We’re going to have to get used to the idea that it’s realistic that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin will [attack a Nato country within 5-8 years],” said Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, chair of the Bundestag defence committee. “The man is driven by a kind of imperialism we never believed could exist in the 21st century.”
“It is a credible threat, and we need to be prepared for that,” said one senior Nato diplomat of the warnings of a potential Russian attack on an alliance member. “I do not find such predictions fantasy . . . We do not have the luxury to think that Russia would stop in Ukraine.”
One senior European official went as far as saying that Russia’s “intent and capability” to attack a Nato country before the end of the decade was “pretty much consensus” within the US-led military alliance. “Opportunity is the only variable,” the official said.
Officials said that one reason for the dire warnings was to prepare societies for the potential danger, and to ensure that civilian infrastructure was ready for the possible consequences.
That includes ensuring national energy supplies and stockpiles are resilient enough, that communications networks are secure and could function properly in the event of war, and that critical infrastructure, including roads and railways, could handle the large amount of military equipment that would need to be transported across Europe.
Nato’s Joint Support and Enabling Command, an alliance command centre in the southern German city of Ulm, is drawing up plans for how Nato military forces would deploy around Europe and be sustained and reinforced in the event of a conflict, officials said.
That process will draw on lessons learnt from the ongoing Steadfast Defender exercise which simulates a large-scale conflict with an enemy to Nato’s east, the largest such war games in the alliance’s history since the cold war.
Admiral Rob Bauer, who heads the Nato committee that advises the military alliance’s military strategy, said the exercise was about “preparing for a conflict with Russia”.
General Sir Patrick Sanders, the outgoing head of the British Army, has warned that the UK public needed to be ready to fight in a potential war with Russia. British citizens should be “trained and equipped” to fight, because Moscow planned on “defeating our system and way of life”, said Sanders in a speech last month.
Such warnings were not an attempt to spark panic, said the first British intelligence official. The warnings, he said, “are so that we have foresight and are forewarned as there is often a very short period between being warned and being in a crisis”.
A senior Ukrainian official said Kyiv had “strong intelligence” that Putin was making preparations for war against the Baltic states. “Putin just cannot stop.”
However, some members of the alliance are sceptical that Russia’s president intends to attack a Nato member. “We assess that he takes our Article 5 commitment seriously and does not want to go to war with Nato,” said one senior US defence official.
Putin has said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, and has made repeated statements about Moscow’s desire to protect Russian-speaking populations outside its borders. That argument was one of many deployed by the Kremlin to support its war against Ukraine.
Estonia’s foreign intelligence service said this week that Russia intended to double the number of its troops stationed along its border with the Baltic states and Finland, a move that could foreshadow a potential military conflict with Nato within the next decade.
“Putin does everything he says he will. And the only thing that can stop him is a policy of strength,” said Christoph Heusgen, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s longtime foreign affairs adviser, and now head of the Munich Security Conference. “It’s the only thing he understands.”
Additional reporting by Derek Brower in New York