By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Last week we argued that it is time for NATO leaders to formally accept reality: Putin is a threat to the alliance and its members, and, therefore, they should declare so in the news strategic concept. Indeed, not declaring Russia a formal threat to NATO territory would compromise NATO’s credibility and would give Putin a pass for the atrocities and violations he has committed in Ukraine. Neither NATO nor the United States can afford to allow that to happen.

The map of Europe is being redrawn, with “de-Russification” sweeping the Continent as countries move to wean themselves from Russian oil and gas, stripping the Kremlin of vital income. Germany has canceled NordStream, the controversial gas pipeline with Moscow that was on the cusp of being approved.

More than one hundred days into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the war has brought the world a near-daily drumbeat of gut-wrenching scenes: Civilian corpses in the streets of Bucha; a blown-up theater in Mariupol; the chaos at a Kramatorsk train station in the wake of a Russian missile strike.

Those images tell just a part of the overall picture of Europe's worst armed conflict in decades. In some places such as the long-besieged city of Mariupol, potentially the war's biggest killing field, Russian forces are accused of trying to cover up deaths and dumping bodies into mass graves, clouding the overall toll.

Across NATO, defense planners are reassessing Moscow’s military might in their contingency plans in the unlikely event of a conventional war between the alliance and Russia, according to multiple current and former U.S. and European defense officials. The reassessments come after Moscow’s embarrassing military setbacks in Ukraine, as well as the Kremlin’s willingness to launch a full-fledged military invasion in the first place.

There are two major assumptions that defense planners in major NATO capitals got wrong for years, former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in an interview with Foreign Policy. First, Rasmussen said, “we have overestimated the strength of the Russian military. Despite huge investments in military equipment and the reopening of old Soviet bases, we have seen a very weak Russian military.”

“The other miscalculation is we have underestimated the brutality and the ambitions of President [Vladimir] Putin,” Rasmussen added.

Now, in capitals in Europe and North America, wonks in defense ministries are dusting off years-old assessments of the Russian military’s fighting prowess and starting to question long-held assumptions on what a conventional war between NATO members and Russia is would look like.

“Whether it was morale or communications or lack of preparedness, there’s a bunch of factors that have added up to something that you just wouldn’t expect to see from an advanced military,” Skaluba said of the Russian forces, “even if the initial conditions or assumptions under which they went in [to Ukraine] were invalidated.”

One possible scenario that NATO militaries had long prepared for is a rapid land-grab of the Baltic states, on NATO’s vulnerable eastern flank. NATO members had planned and prepared exercises to take those countries back from Russian forces—presuming that Russia could quickly overwhelm their militaries and capture the territory in the first place.

After seeing how poorly Russian troops fared against Ukraine’s forces, some U.S. and other Western defense planners are pushing NATO to reassess that plan: It seems more feasible that, with the proper size and combination of alliance forces, command structures, and military hardware in the Baltics, they could effectively deter or, if not, withstand and repel an invasion by Russian forces. On the flip side, a Russian attempt to invade NATO territory in the Baltics also suddenly seems like a much less unlikely scenario.

Baltic leaders propose that NATO expand its footprint in the region at the upcoming NATO summit in Madrid in late June. If enacted, Baltic officials say, the upgrade in NATO forces could act as a more effective form of “deterrence by denial” against Putin preparing any plans to seize Baltic territory. After having seen U.S. intelligence on the impending Russian invasion borne out, Baltic nations are hoping that laggards like France and Germany will sign onto their plan.

 

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