Mihail Evans is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, New Europe College in Bucharest.

Addressing the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs in January 2025, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte urged EU countries to increase their defense spending, warning that if European nations do not dramatically expand military spending citizens will need to “get out your Russian language courses.” This presentation was part of a blizzard of diplomacy by the alliance’s Secretary General, which culminated in alliance members pledging to spend an unprecedented 5 percent of GDP on defense at a summit in The Hague at the end of June 2025. For European states, this is an historic spending commitment of unprecedented magnitude. Whether or not it is warranted is a matter of great importance.

Mobilized Russian soldiers in the trenches of Ukraine | Source: Shutterstock

Rutte has apparently convinced European leaders that Russia has future aggressive intentions, but his claims have been exposed to little serious scrutiny. There are two pressing questions that need to be asked. Firstly, whether today or at any stage in the foreseeable future, the Russian military has the capability to undertake an attack on a NATO member state? And, secondly, does Russian President Vladimir Putin have a realistic rationale for invading any European country? That is, does Russia have the capacity or strategic interest for such an offensive action?

The first question deserves a resoundingly negative answer. In nearly three years of intense fighting, Russian forces have not managed to capture Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine, much less the country’s capital, Kyiv. As of summer 2025, they occupy 20 percent of the country, only half of which was captured during the last three years of fighting. Since 2024, a mere 0.6 percent of the country has been taken.

The cost of this glacially slow progress is estimated to be 1,000 casualties a day with totals now reaching into the hundreds of thousands. Just to maintain this rather geographically limited conflict, Putin has been forced to enlist prisoners and deploy North Korean troops. Recruits have been sought in Cuba, Syria, Nepal, and India, as well as in former Soviet republics of Central Asia. There are great difficulties with turning those enlisted into an effective fighting force. One in five deaths have been of commanders, with the ranks of junior officers sustaining significant damage. These losses have made the reconstitution of effective units a severe challenge. 

One might already reasonably suspect that Russia is reaching the limits of the manpower it can mobilize without risking political instability. Currently, recruits are largely attracted from poorer provincial areas through relatively high wages and one-off sign-up bonuses (a lump sum that at the moment is larger than the average national annual wage). Should the army be forced to draw extensively on metropolitan areas and the middle classes, resistance might appear more readily. In the late 1980s, a death toll of 15,000 in the Afghan War led to the mothers of soldiers organizing. Thus far, the authorities have managed to prevent large-scale protests from developing but should army recruiters start to cast their nets more widely, they risk the prospect of opposition snowballing quickly. 

The war now accounts for 40 percent of government expenditure and, while such levels of spending initially led to a war boom, this has come at the expense of the wider economy. Thanks partly to excellent management by the Central Bank, sanctions have had much less impact than expected. But massive cracks are beginning to show with severe labor shortages and inflation officially at around 10 percent, but estimated by some to be closer to 15 percent. Interest rates hovering around a punishing 20 percent mean businesses are struggling.

At the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in July 2025, Russia’s Economic Development Minister Maxim Reshetnikov, admitted “we are on the brink of a recession.” Although the Israel-Iran conflict has halted falling oil and gas revenues and given a brief respite the outlook is not good. Maxim Oreshkin, economic advisor to the Presidential Executive Office, has frankly admitted, “the model that ensured growth in recent years has largely reached its limit.” One recent assessment contends: “Russia’s dependence on military spending, low-tech exports, and high inflation may lead to economic stagnation of the kind seen in the Soviet Union in the 1980s.”

In order to simply maintain the current conflict in Ukraine, Russia must strain every sinew, militarily and economically. It simply does not have the resources to reconstitute its military and engage in an additional war that would necessarily be considerably more demanding. It needs to be stressed that, given Article 5 of the North Atlantic treaty, attacking any European neighbor (all of which are NATO members with the exception of Moldova and Belarus) would effectively mean taking on the entire alliance.

The alliance would be a vastly superior opponent to a Ukraine that is merely NATO-supplied. As Rutte inter alia revealed in his European Parliament presentation: “Russia is not bigger than the Netherlands and Belgium combined as an economy.” There is much individual states can do to have the best prepared forces but at base war is a numbers game and the odds are overwhelmingly against Russia in a clash with the alliance. A former British diplomat in Moscow has concluded: “in an attritional war with NATO, which Russia has always sought to avoid, it would not have the demographic or economic reserves to win out.”

As of April 2024, EU members alone were militarily outspending Russia by several multiples—even at current, supposedly low, rates. Roberto Vannacci MEP, a former Italian General who is a member of the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs, cited these figures when contesting the plausibility of Rutte’s claims. He pointed out that Europe “at peace” was already devoting €314 billion a year while Russia on a wartime footing was spending only €140 billion. On aggregate, before its new spending commitments, the bloc was already the third largest military spender globally.

In the current conflict in Ukraine, the Russian air force has performed poorly, often holding back from greater engagement. It has a dated inventory when compared to its western equivalents and it often fails to use its best hardware effectively. Retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Scott Kindsvater has, perhaps rather hyperbolically, contended: “the Russian air force has not only failed to learn the lessons of Desert Storm in 1991 and aerial campaigns since then, but even the lessons of World War II.” Persistently, there is poor coordination with ground forces. It is widely agreed that in any potential conflict with Russia, NATO would immediately dominate airspace, a move that would ultimately be decisive for the outcome.

In recent times Russia has engaged in a shipbuilding program that has impressed some foreign analysts. But there are many hints that its navy might look better on paper than in reality: the Admiral Kuznetsov, its only aircraft carrier, has been undergoing a refit since 2017 and the Moskva, flagship of its Black Sea Fleet, is sitting on the seabed having been sunk by almost navy less Ukraine. As a largely landlocked power, Russia has never been a significant naval power and has particularly invested in submarines, a classic strategy of the naval underdog. However these perform in any potential conflict, it is unlikely that they could prevent an economically devastating naval blockade being imposed.

With NATO commanding air and sea, any potential conflict would be confined to land. Russia’s army faces a number of almost insuperable challenges in the short to medium term. It is not only running out of manpower but their dated military methods have pretty much reached the end of the road. The short war with Georgia in 2008, in which they performed surprisingly badly, prompted the Serdyukov reforms. These sought to professionalize the military but petered out in the face of opposition. By and large, the Russian army still fights as it did when Stalin commanded it during World War II. The core tactic remains massive artillery bombardment. The intensity of the conflict in Ukraine has been such that the Russian army has run through ammunition stockpiles that were built up over decades, going back even into Cold War, with no realistic way of replenishing them.

For quite some time, a rather large proportion of shells fired by Russian forces in Ukraine have been supplied by North Korea. As Yang Uk, a military expert at Seoul’s Asan Institute for Policy Studies, remarks: “since the Russian way of war is based upon fire superiority, it takes tons of ammunition. And the only country that can provide that kind of volume, besides Russia, is North Korea.” A UN expert contended that “without Chairman Kim Jong Un’s support, President Vladimir Putin wouldn’t really be able to prosecute his war in Ukraine.”

Militarily, Putin is visibly struggling simply to maintain the current conflict. This is so manifest that those who seek to conjure up a threat habitually must shift to speaking of a nebulous medium term. A reconstitution of Russian forces in five years can sound superficially plausible, only because such a timeframe necessitates focusing out and distracting from detail. Intelligence agencies have been suspiciously to the forefront in attempts to claim that such a reconstitution is possible. Assertions by Danish intelligence in the spring of 2025 that Russia could fight a war in the Baltics within two years and a major war within five have been circulated enthusiastically. However, no close analysis was provided and an incurious western media has failed to ask crucial questions about how and why. A Bundeswehr strategy paper conveniently leaked just before the NATO summit in The Hague, takes recent deployment of forces to Russia’s western borders as an indication of aggressive intent. Yet this might more plausibly be seen simply as a response to alliance activity and belligerent rhetoric.

Similarly, Bundeswehr Inspector General Carsten Breuer has sought to suggest that Russia is “building up its stocks” of tanks, simply on the basis that not every one that rolls off the production line goes to the frontline in Ukraine. This is a rather misleading presentation of a situation that, from the Russian point of view, is actually rather dire. Given both drone innovations and the availability of the latest precision NATO systems to Ukraine, Russian tank and gun losses have been significant. Even surviving equipment needs its barrels replaced at regular intervals while Russia’s very limited capacity to produce new ones is vastly less than its current needs. Of the rotary forges necessary, there are only two available in the entire country and it is impossible to acquire more from the only global supplier in Austria. For some time, already rusting and obsolete Soviet equipment has been desperately cannibalized. Breuer overlooks that tanks coming off the production line are 80 percent refurbished, often models verging on obsolescence. As in Soviet times, quantity has been chosen over quality. The supposedly most up to date tanks are not even risked in service. Breuer’s claims also ignore that, in any case, tanks have become dramatically less effective on the battlefield. The Ukraine War will probably be looked back on as one of the fundamental shifts in military history. The Great War, fought just over a hundred years ago, saw cavalry eclipsed by armour. Highly vulnerable to attack by cheap drones, tanks are no longer dominant and are becoming reduced to a role as mobile artillery.

Sober academic assessments conclude that “apart from drone production, equipment production capacities have plateaued as of early 2024. Russia could generate more efficiency in the system by reducing corruption on the margins and reemphasizing innovation for certain technologies, but this would not result in a dramatic increase in available resources.” Beyond the issues of hardware and manpower, and perhaps most crucially, in order to pose a serious threat to Europe, Putin would at the very minimum need to entirely reinvent Russian military strategy and culture from scratch. A former senior British army commander who has been among the most keen to hype the Russian threat in the UK press has recently noted how the emphasis on blind obedience in a rigid command chain that leaves no room for initiative has become a fatal weakness. Any transformation in military culture seems highly unlikely given that Ukraine, to the frustration of its allies, still clings to Soviet practices even  under the pressing exigencies of the current conflict and after more than a decade of training from NATO militaries. 

Europe is, of course, unprepared to fight a war of the type Ukraine is currently waging with thousands of casualties on the battlefield every month. But Tom Enders, the head of the German Council on Foreign Relations said in a March 2025 interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that it would never need to. Rather than seeking to match the mass of Russian military, he said European forces should invest in relatively cheap, smart defensive measures. Militarily, one of the major lessons that has come out of the three year conflict in Ukraine is that modern technology favors the defense.

Reading between the lines, it might even be suspected that defense establishments in Europe don’t really believe Putin poses a significant threat themselves. We have seen Vannacci, a former General in a major European force, dismiss Rutte’s claims. One might suspect that commanders are using Trump’s politically driven demand for increased military as spending as an excuse to dust off procurement wish lists. A compliant media has failed to ask hard questions. Scrutiny is so lacking that a 5 percent commitment, a spending pledge of unprecedented proportions historically, has been made almost without demur and without any sort of democratic mandate.

There are huge dangers in recklessly inflating the threat posed by Putin. In a candid judgement, Dr. Marion Messmer, a senior research fellow at Chatham House, has declared that the most likely trigger for a war with Russia would be miscalculation, rather than design. Historians have famously argued that Europe sleepwalked into World War I. Current saber-rattling may be targeted primarily at those holding the purse strings at home and might be seen as consequence-free. But ramping up war rhetoric is performative and risks another major conflict on the continent.

Vast spending is proposed at a time when most European states are struggling to balance their budgets. Yet the basic question of “why would Putin even consider attacking any European state?” is rarely asked, let alone convincingly answered. An analysis by Bloomberg economists just before the NATO summit in The Hague was able to produce dramatic figures about the costs of a war in the Baltics but, significantly, struggled to propose a convincing motivation for an offensive attack by Russia.

Shortly after the 2022 invasion, Mateusz Morawiecki, the then prime minister of Poland, contended that “the war in Ukraine has exposed the truth about Russia. Many refused to see that Vladimir Putin’s state still has imperialist tendencies. Now they have to face the fact that, in Russia, the demons of the 19th and 20th centuries have been revived: nationalism, colonialism, and totalitarianism.” This has become the most frequently repeated account of the origins of the invasion. European Commission officials similarly tell the media of a “twisted desire to reinstate” the Russian Empire. Apparently, Putin in the grip of an overwhelming imperial nostalgia, unable to get over the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, now seeks to recreate it.

Yet this simply would not withstand scrutiny. The USSR was a federation of 15 states stretching from the Baltics in the north and Moldova in the south to the easternmost point of Asia. There is not a slightest sign that Putin or anyone else in power in Russia thinks that recreating such a state, or even a substantial portion of it, by force would be plausible. Distinguished French historian and demographer Emmanuel Todd has described the idea of a Russian invasion of Europe after conquering Ukraine as the stuff of “fantasy and propaganda.” He contends that “the truth is that Russia, with a shrinking population and a territory of 17 million square kilometers, far from wanting to conquer new territories, wonders above all how she will continue to occupy those she already possesses.”

Certainly, if one looks at where Russia has engaged militarily in the last two decades or so, it has always been in relatively circumscribed areas in its immediate neighborhood or internally against separatists. This can more cogently be presented as responding to circumstances rather than a part of a neoimperialist plan. While speaking to CNN in 2014, former U.S. President Barack Obama described the annexation of Crimea as an “improvisation” in response to the regime change in Ukraine that followed the Maidan protests.

During his presentation in the European Parliament, Rutte asked: “Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014 and again in 2022, so what is the next target to be?” In attempting to gauge the existence of a threat, we might ask why Putin acted militarily in each of these cases. As American international relations expert John Mearsheimer has convincingly argued, all three interventions can be traced back to the fateful decision at the 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit, held in the dying days of the George W. Bush presidency, to promise future NATO membership to Georgia and Ukraine.

Putin’s desire is not to recreate the Russian Empire but merely to prevent his country from being encircled by the alliance. This ambition is rather more modest than the Monroe Doctrine of the United States, which claims the entire Western Hemisphere as a military cordon sanitaire. In 2008 the U.S. Ambassador to Moscow described NATO membership for Ukraine as “the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite,” emphasizing that it was not just Putin who had objections but the entire political class. This message from a very well-informed professional never seems to have made it to Washington.

Putin invaded Georgia a few months later (in response to what even an EU report described as aggression) and Crimea after regime change was engineered in Kyiv in 2014. The 2022 invasion of Ukraine came after years of escalation over the issue of NATO membership and frustrations over the treatment of the Russian language and the Soviet past by regimes in Kyiv.

“Latvia” was the answer Rutte himself provided for his question during his address to the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs. However, he gave no explanation why Russia might invade its tiny Baltic neighbor. It had, of course, been a constituent republic of the USSR and it later joined NATO in 2004. Despite not being particularly happy about it, Putin accepted Latvia’s accession and, indeed, had himself sought membership in the alliance for Russia not long before. This was despite the treatment of Russian speakers in the country being a sore that had been festering since independence.

We have seen Morawiecki speak of the demon of nationalism as if Russia were the only place in the region where this spirit of the past might be reborn. But in post-independence Latvia, much like in neighboring Estonia, only those who could speak the national language were granted citizenship. This left a third of the population who spoke Russian (not all of them ethnic Russians) stateless. The apparent mystery of why Rutte thinks Putin might have issues with Latvia starts to become clearer.

Although the EU’s 1993 Copenhagen criteria for membership ostensibly demanded respect for and protection of minorities, the three Baltic states were admitted in 2004 without substantially addressing such matters. The only concession extracted was granting nationality to the so-called “stateless children,” all those born since independence. This still left a large, albeit steadily decreasing, proportion of the population living in Latvia as non-citizens.

Latvian is legally the state’s only official language. When the Baltic country ratified the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, they did so only partially, failing to affirm those articles that would give Russian speakers the right to deal with the state in their native language. Mairead Nic Craith, a leading authority on minority rights in Europe concluded Russian speakers “were effectively deprived of certain key rights.” Russian speakers predominate in regions of the country with the highest unemployment and lowest incomes. They have been both culturally and economically marginalized in independent Latvia.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, repression of the Russian language in Latvia has dramatically expanded. All those with Russian citizenship—often taken to secure a pension—face expulsion if they cannot pass language tests. Latvia has also long had much more aggressively nationalist education laws than even its Baltic neighbors. Now, following the most recent crackdown, Latvian will be the only medium of instruction in kindergartens, schools, and universities by September 2025, a move the UN has condemned as being “in contradiction with international human rights standards.”

Parliamentarians who sought to resist these developments have attracted the attention of the State Security Services. Alexei Roslikov, the leader of a party that draws support mainly from Russian speaking Latvians, has been put under investigation for “inciting ethnic tensions.” The European Court of Human Rights has failed to condemn the educational reforms in a ruling that commentators have criticized as diverging from international norms. This judgment is perhaps not so surprising given that the court has consistently failed to develop a robust conception of linguistic rights, as is notably evident in its decisions relating to Ukraine.

When Rutte was asked where the cash might come from for increases in military spending, he pointed to “pensions, health, and social security systems.” This will hardly be a popular option with austerity weary European publics. Might a cheaper alternative not be a return to European values, particularly the Copenhagen principles of respect for minorities; to insist that Russian speaking Latvian children be allowed to get their textbooks out? Rutte clearly knows Putin has issues with Latvian policy towards Russian speakers. Europe might save its money if it simply made sure he had none. NATO must stop saber-rattling and the EU needs to start to engage diplomatically. This would be a vastly less costly solution and one more in line with the founding aim of the bloc to foster a lasting continental peace.

 

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