BRUSSELS — European governments worry Vladimir Putin will see this as his moment to strike.
Defense officials and lawmakers fear the Kremlin will consider the next year or two, while Donald Trump is still in the White House and the EU hasn’t yet reinforced its military capacity, as the time to test the West’s commitment to NATO, according to three EU politicians with direct knowledge of the discussions, interviewed for this article. While Russia’s war in Ukraine has shown the limits of Moscow’s might, the Russian president has long signaled his desire to take more territory.
“Something could happen very soon — there is a Russian window of opportunity,” said Mika Aaltola, a Finnish center-right member of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee. “The U.S. is withdrawing from Europe, transatlantic relations are in a shambles, and the EU is not yet fully ready to take on the responsibilities by themselves.”
While defense officials and policymakers don’t rule out Putin launching a ground offensive in a NATO country, they say it’s unlikely given how stretched Russia is in fighting Ukraine, according to one senior NATO diplomat and three senior European defense officials, who were granted anonymity to speak freely about the sensitive matter.
Instead, it’s far more likely he’ll do something more targeted or carry out an incursion designed to create ambiguity, hoping to sow division in NATO over whether the action meets the threshold to trigger its Article 5 mutual defense clause or not, Aaltola said.
Article 5 declares that allies should regard an armed attack against one of them “as an armed attack against all” but Trump has called NATO a “paper tiger.” He is due to leave office in Jan. 2029.
Putin could “escalate horizontally against another neighbor, trying to avoid a humiliating negotiation with Ukraine,” Gabrielius Landsbergis, the former foreign minister of Lithuania who has also warned about Putin’s “window of opportunity,” told POLITICO.
While European defense spending has risen sharply in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the full impact will take years to be felt on the ground, according to the EU’s Defense Readiness Roadmap. The bloc wants to be ready to “credibly deter its adversaries and respond to any aggression” by 2030, according to the roadmap.
“It could be a small psychological thing that makes us scared, if Putin feels that kind of escalation makes us weaker and makes us feel threatened and reduces support for Ukraine,” said Ville Niinistö, the chair of the European Parliament’s Delegation to the EU-Russia Parliamentary Cooperation Committee and a former government minister in Finland, which shares a 1,340 kilometer border with Russia.
“Russia is not omnipotent,” he said. “But desperation is also dangerous.”
What does Trump do next?
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Saturday that “the greatest threat to the transatlantic community” is “the ongoing disintegration of our alliance.”
If Putin is monitoring Trump’s commitment to NATO then his domestic political challenges will factor in. If Republicans fare poorly in the midterm elections in November, Trump may look to win back his base by pushing harder against his bêtes noires NATO and Europe and pulling back further from support for Ukraine, ahead of the 2028 U.S. presidential election, according to a senior European defense official.
The U.S. on Friday announced it would pull 5,000 U.S. troops out of Germany. Trump threatened the same for Italy and Spain.
“There is a risk for an even worse turn” in the U.S. posture toward NATO because of the domestic political climate, said the senior defense official. To see off the threat, the EU must “invest heavily and invest together” to be ready to defend itself.
And although Russia is weakened, with Ukraine penetrating its defenses and striking deep in its territory, troop casualties mounting and Kyiv managing to retake territory, this only serves to make Putin more dangerous for Europe at this moment, said Aaltola, the foreign affairs MEP.
“Escalating the [Ukraine] conflict to some other theaters could give Russia a card to play with … the war is exhausting their resources, so they are looking for a way out,” Aaltola said. And that way out is “not peace negotiations — it’s expanding the conflict.”
Putin has many soft targets to choose from, Aaltola said, and an attack could “take multiple different shapes,” with the Kremlin unlikely to do something so clearcut as launching “an incursion where NATO is strong, like the Polish border.”
“It could be a drone operation, it could be a Baltic Sea operation … It could be something in the Arctic, targeting small islands. They have the shadow fleet, which is already partly militarized,” Aaltola said. “A drone attack doesn’t require troops, it doesn’t require crossing the border.”
In launching such an operation, Putin would be seeking to place pressure on Ukraine’s European allies, while avoiding any potential U.S. response.
“If there is no attack across the border, the U.S. might say this is not strategically that important,” Aaltola said. “They are strained with their resources in Iran, so perhaps they would advise negotiations with Russia. And that’s precisely what Russia would try to do with this.”
Alarmism
Europe isn’t united on its calculation of the severity of the immediate Russian threat. There is some tension between politicians from countries like Finland and Lithuania, who are raising the alarm and arguing Europe urgently needs to step up its anti-missile and defense readiness amid delays to U.S. weapons deliveries due to the Iran war, and the more cautious approach in Estonia and NATO itself, where officials say any alarmism feeds into Putin’s playbook.
But those playing down the threat risk lulling Europe into a false sense of security, said Aaltola. This “is actually the worst thing you can create in democratic countries,” he said. “We need to allocate resources, and if there’s a false sense of security, then resources are not allocated to defense.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggested in a TV interview that Russia could be gearing up to make a move on “one of the Baltics, for example.” Senior officials in Kyiv have said they are targets because of their support for Ukraine.
“The Russians are sending a signal” because they’ve accused the Baltics of allowing Ukrainian drones to use their airspace, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha told reporters.
Politicians in the Baltics have attempted to play that threat down. Officials in NATO are equally skeptical.
“Russia is very busy in Ukraine,” Estonian President Alar Karis told POLITICO. “I don’t think it has enough capacity to try” to wage war on the Baltics too.
That argument was echoed by the senior NATO diplomat and three senior European defense officials.
“I find it highly unlikely,” said the senior NATO diplomat. Putin’s “suicidal trend has its limits — especially when there is no apparent evident and immediate gain.”
“It is clear that Russia sees itself in a long-term confrontation with the West,” said a second senior European defense official. “However, we currently maintain our assessment that there is no short-term military threat to NATO due to Russia’s engagement in Ukraine. This does not mean we should not remain vigilant, as Russia may miscalculate our unity and resolve.”
A “two-front battle” is a “very, very risky strategy” for Putin, said the third senior defense official, especially as Europe is “strongly progressing” on building up its own defenses.
But, as Karis acknowledged, Europe can’t rule anything out.
“You never know. And, nobody was expecting the war in Ukraine,” the Estonian president said. “We are alert. We are ready. We keep our eyes open.”
Veronika Melkozerova and Jacopo Barigazzi contributed reporting.
