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.