Russia’s Next War
Unable to secure a decisive victory in Ukraine, the Kremlin is looking for another form of escalation. The Baltics may be the first target, but Moscow is already testing the entire NATO — its information resilience, military logistics and willingness to activate Article 5.
The geographical front line of Russia’s war still runs through Ukraine. The confrontation itself no longer does.
On 18 July 2026, Reuters reported that Germany had raised its national security posture from an “abstract” to a “high” threat level. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said that plans for attacks against Germany were becoming clearly discernible and that the risk of attacks against infrastructure, institutions and individuals had to be considered at all times. His warning addressed a broader security environment rather than Russia alone. Yet it came against the background of a documented expansion of Russian sabotage, cyberattacks, espionage, electronic interference and pressure against European infrastructure.
This activity is not a collection of unrelated incidents. In its Washington Summit Declaration back on 10 July 2024, NATO described Russia as the most significant and direct threat to Allied security. The declaration identified a Russian campaign involving sabotage, violence, border provocations, malicious cyber activity, electronic interference, disinformation, political influence and economic coercion across the Euro-Atlantic area.
Europe is therefore no longer simply the rear area supporting Ukraine. Instead, it has become part of the wider battlespace constructed by Russia.
This does not mean that a conventional Russia–NATO war has already begun, as it clearly has not. Yet. Moscow is steadily eroding the practical distinction between war and peace. The Kremlin is attacking European security while deliberately avoiding the clarity that would make a unified military response inevitable.
The Baltic information front
The Baltic region is emerging as the most visible testing ground for this strategy.
On 20 July 2026, Lithuania’s Defence Minister Robertas Kaunas stated in an interview that as Russia is clearly unable to secure the victory it expected in Ukraine, it could push the Kremlin to search for an alternative form of success.
“The Kremlin, Putin, needs a new escalation, some kind of new win, and the Baltic region and Poland are the nearest target in this case,” Kaunas said.
Lithuanian authorities have consequently strengthened protection around bridges, electricity substations, gas supply systems and communications hubs. At the same time, Lithuania’s military leadership stated that it saw no immediate signs of preparation for a conventional Russian invasion. The most immediate threat is therefore not necessarily an armoured offensive, but provocations conducted through hybrid or limited military means.
In its Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment of 21 July 2026, the Institute for the Study of War examined warnings that Russia could be preparing provocations against NATO’s eastern flank, potentially including the use of captured Ukrainian drones in false-flag operations.
The strategic logic of "Phase Zero", the operation’s codename, is clear.
A drone carrying Ukrainian components or markings could be used to generate competing explanations immediately after an incident. Russia could deny involvement, distribute contradictory accounts through its information networks and present Ukraine as either an irresponsible actor that had lost control of its weapons or a deliberate threat to European security.
The objective would not necessarily be to convince everyone of one Russian version. Preventing a common interpretation from emerging quickly could be enough.
An ambiguous incident could delay NATO consultations, provoke disputes over attribution and fuel demands to restrict Ukrainian operations. It could also force European countries to redirect air-defence systems, intelligence assets and security personnel away from supporting Ukraine and towards protecting their own territory.
The Baltic states are not entering this confrontation unprepared. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are among the European countries with the deepest practical experience in recognising and countering Russian information warfare.
A Hybrid CoE report published on 2 October 2025 noted that the Baltic states were substantially more resilient to several Russian narratives than many other European societies. The report also identified the Baltic countries and Ukraine as sources of some of the most developed practices for exposing, limiting and deterring information aggressors.
This preparedness matters because information warfare does not merely accompany Russian offensive action. It precedes and enables it.
Before occupying Crimea in February and March 2014, Russia constructed narratives about persecution, fascism, historical injustice and the supposed need to protect Russian-speaking people. Similar narratives were used to legitimize Russian intervention in the Donbas.
Information warfare created an alternative reality in which aggression could be presented as rescue, occupation as self-defence and local collaborators as representatives of an allegedly oppressed population.
Any Russian operation against the Baltic states would require a similar preparatory campaign. Moscow would seek to weaken the legitimacy of Baltic governments, exaggerate tensions around language and citizenship, portray NATO forces as foreign occupiers and create uncertainty about who had initiated the crisis.
The Baltic states may be among Europe’s best-prepared societies to recognise such a campaign. But recognising the weapon does not make them immune to it.
The people Russia may decide to “protect”
One of the Kremlin’s available instruments is the continued existence of Russian-speaking communities and particular legal categories inherited from the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The most prominent example is Latvia’s category of non-citizens: permanent residents who do not possess full Latvian citizenship and national voting rights. The number of people in this category has steadily declined, and Latvian law provides a naturalisation mechanism. In this sense, the legal and administrative dimension of the problem has largely been institutionalised.
Yet the category still exists.
According to official Latvian statistics published on 2 June 2026, non-citizens accounted for 8.7% of Latvia’s population at the beginning of 2026, compared with 87.9% who held Latvian citizenship.
The remaining strategic vulnerability is not that these people necessarily support Russia. They do not constitute a unified political bloc, and Russian-speaking identity should never be treated as evidence of disloyalty.
The vulnerability lies in the fact that the group exists and Russia may decide to “protect” it.
Moscow does not require widespread persecution to construct a persecution narrative. It needs a recognisable community, selected grievances, local collaborators and an information network capable of transforming individual disputes into supposed evidence of systemic oppression.
A small group presented as the authentic voice of a persecuted minority could be sufficient to organise demonstrations, fabricate appeals for assistance or justify the presence of Russian agents.
Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territory demonstrated that the Kremlin’s promise to “protect” a community is often the moment when that community becomes most endangered.
The policy challenge for the Baltic states is therefore twofold. They must prevent Moscow from exploiting real social divisions while avoiding the securitisation of entire linguistic communities. Treating all Russian speakers as potential enemies would only provide the Kremlin with additional material for its narratives.
The Church as a legitimising structure
The Russian Orthodox Church occupies a particularly important place in this system because it can present state narratives as moral truths rather than political claims.
Russian state television can be dismissed as propaganda. A government statement can be interpreted as diplomacy. A religious institution, however, speaks through the language of faith, tradition, identity and spiritual authority. It can reach audiences that would distrust an openly political messenger.
In its International Security and Estonia 2026 report, published on 10 February 2026, Estonia’s Foreign Intelligence Service assessed that Russia was using the international network of the Russian Orthodox Church in anti-Western influence operations. The service specifically noted Moscow’s attempts to cultivate extremist sympathisers and spread false claims about the persecution of Orthodox believers in Ukraine.
The Church does more than repeat state narratives. It legitimises them.
The Kremlin presents Russia as the defender of Christianity, traditional values and historical continuity against a supposedly decadent and aggressive West. Church structures can translate this geopolitical narrative into the language of spiritual conflict.
Political loyalty to Moscow is reframed as defence of the faith. Restrictions on institutions connected to the Russian state are described as religious persecution. Resistance to Russian influence becomes evidence of hostility towards Christianity itself.
This mechanism would be particularly useful before a confrontation in the Baltic region. Disputes over Russian-linked church structures, language policies, historical memory or Soviet monuments could be assembled into a single narrative of civilisational oppression.
Baltic security policy must therefore distinguish between protecting genuine religious freedom and tolerating institutional networks used as channels of influence by a hostile state. Failure to draw this distinction gives Moscow a socially protected platform from which it can prepare the informational terrain for escalation.
Horizontal escalation as a way out of the deadlock
The growing pressure on NATO’s eastern flank must also be viewed in the context of the battlefield in Ukraine.
Russia has committed enormous human and material resources to the war but has struggled to transform them into a decisive strategic breakthrough. Its forces may continue to advance in individual sectors, but territorial gains remain slow, costly and insufficient to produce the political victory Putin requires.
The Kremlin therefore faces a problem. Continuing the same war of attrition preserves pressure on Ukraine but does not automatically generate a convincing victory.
One possible response is horizontal escalation: broadening the conflict geographically or functionally instead of achieving a decisive vertical breakthrough through Ukrainian defences.
This would not necessarily mean an immediate full-scale invasion of a NATO member. A conventional attack would carry enormous military risks and could unite an Alliance that Russia is attempting to divide.
A more plausible opening would involve selective kinetic incidents, sabotage, cyberattacks, electronic warfare, drone incursions, manufactured border crises and false-flag operations.
Through such actions, Russia could attempt to change the political course of the war without changing the front line in Ukraine.
A limited operation against a NATO state could expose disagreements over how Article 5 should apply to ambiguous or deniable attacks. Sabotage could pressure governments to prioritise domestic security over assistance to Ukraine. A false-flag incident could damage trust between Kyiv and its partners.
Russia’s desired victory would not have to be the occupation of Tallinn, Riga or Vilnius. It could be a delayed weapons shipment, a divided NATO meeting, the withdrawal of an Allied contingent or a European government deciding that avoiding escalation is more important than deterring it.
The absence of an imminent conventional invasion should therefore not be mistaken for the absence of escalation. Russia does not need to cross a NATO border with tanks to expand the war. It only needs to create political consequences inside the Alliance.
Article 5 exists on paper, while deterrence exists in Moscow’s mind
The central vulnerability of NATO is not the wording of Article 5. It is uncertainty about how that wording would be translated into action during an actual crisis.
The North Atlantic Treaty was signed on 4 April 1949. Article 5 states that an armed attack against one Ally is considered an attack against all. However, it also allows each member to respond with “such action as it deems necessary,” which may or may not include the use of armed force. National constitutional procedures can also affect how individual countries implement their obligations.
This flexibility was politically necessary when the Alliance was established. In a Baltic crisis, it could become the centre of Russia’s strategy.
The Kremlin would not only test whether Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania could defend themselves. It would test whether the United States was ready to fight Russian forces over Narva or Daugavpils, whether Britain and France were prepared to expose themselves as nuclear powers, and whether Western European governments would accept casualties for territory many of their citizens have never visited.
Official commitments remain strong. Previously mentioned NATO’s 10 July 2024 Washington Summit Declaration described Article 5 as ironclad and nuclear deterrence as the cornerstone of Allied security.
But deterrence is not determined only by what Allied documents say. It depends on what the Kremlin believes Allied leaders will actually do.
Article 5 has been activated only once: following the terrorist attacks against the United States on 11 September 2001. NATO has never had to apply it in response to a direct attack by another nuclear-armed state against a small European Ally.
The greatest danger is therefore a gap between declared commitment and perceived political willingness.
Russia would attempt to widen this gap before and during any operation. Its information campaign would portray the crisis as local, unclear and avoidable. Moscow would threaten nuclear escalation, distribute fabricated evidence and argue that distant NATO members were being dragged into a conflict created by irresponsible Baltic governments.
The first battle would be over whether Allied societies considered the Baltic states fully part of their own security space.
If Moscow doubts the willingness of Washington, London or Paris to respond, conventional deployments on the eastern flank may not be sufficient. Troops deter only when the enemy believes that their governments are politically prepared to reinforce them, accept losses and continue fighting.
The logistics of Alliance solidarity
This raises a practical question that receives considerably less public attention than troop numbers or weapons procurement: what would happen to Allied casualties during a full-scale war in the Baltic region?
Consider a hypothetical Portuguese unit deployed to the Baltic theatre.
If its soldiers were wounded, where would they receive surgery? Which military or civilian hospitals would absorb them after local Baltic capacity was overwhelmed? How would they be transported across contested airspace and damaged rail networks?
If they were killed, who would identify, store and repatriate their bodies? Which routes would remain available if ports, airports, railways and digital systems were under attack?
These are not secondary administrative questions. They are part of deterrence.
NATO’s civil-preparedness framework, developed after the 2016 Warsaw Summit, identifies the ability to manage mass casualties and maintain resilient transport systems as two of the Alliance’s seven baseline requirements. Civilian healthcare systems must be capable of absorbing casualties, while transport networks must remain functional for both military deployments and civilian needs.
On 7 April 2026, NATO reported that Allied militaries had conducted a series of exercises focused specifically on large-scale wartime medicine.
Cold Response 2026 tested the movement of wounded personnel over long distances and across borders. Medic Quadriga 26 examined the evacuation chain from the front line to strategic aeromedical transport. Casualty Move 26 trained NATO structures to manage massive patient flows during a major conflict.
These exercises demonstrate that NATO recognises the problem. They do not mean that it has been solved at the scale that a prolonged high-intensity war could require.
The Alliance would need protected casualty-collection points, mobile surgery, blood supplies, medical trains, aeromedical evacuation, distributed hospital capacity, common patient-tracking systems and procedures for handling large numbers of dead.
Civilian healthcare systems would have to support military operations while continuing to treat local populations affected by missile attacks, displacement and infrastructure disruption.
The political dimension is equally important. Governments must prepare their societies for the reality that Article 5 could mean wounded and dead citizens returning from a distant part of Europe.
Without this preparation, Russia will attempt to convert every casualty into an argument against collective defence.
An Alliance capable of deploying troops but unable to sustain, evacuate or politically absorb its losses does not possess full warfighting readiness.
Russia is mobilising for a longer confrontation
External escalation is developing alongside Russia’s continued internal mobilisation.
The Kremlin has so far avoided repeating the highly disruptive “partial mobilisation” announced in September 2022. Instead, it has relied on large financial bonuses, regional recruitment campaigns, pressure on conscripts, recruitment from prisons and pretrial detention facilities, and increasingly coercive forms of contract enlistment.
There are signs that this system is under growing strain.
On 24 June 2026, Meduza reported that contract recruitment had fallen to approximately 800 people per day during the first quarter of 2026 — the lowest figure in three years — before recovering to around 1,000 per day in the second quarter.
Sources in several Russian regions described increasing difficulty in meeting recruitment quotas, declining recruit quality, desertion and persistent understaffing. The same investigation reported that a new mobilisation wave was being discussed within the state apparatus, potentially after the State Duma elections, although no final decision had been made.
The important point is not that mobilisation has already been ordered. It is that the Kremlin is preparing several ways to expand it.
On 28 October 2025, Russia’s State Duma approved legislation turning military conscription into a year-round administrative process. Russia had also introduced an electronic register for summonses and restrictions against those who evade military registration, including limits on travel, driving and financial transactions.
Recruitment is therefore no longer merely a temporary emergency measure. Legislation, databases, regional budgets, employment policy, prisons and public culture are being reorganised around the requirements of a prolonged war.
Russia is institutionalising mobilisation even when it avoids using the word.
This gives the Kremlin manpower options for continued operations in Ukraine. It also creates the capacity to generate additional forces should Moscow decide to expand the confrontation elsewhere.
Putin’s carefully borrowed confession
Vladimir Putin’s remarks of 26 July 2026 offered a revealing illustration of how deeply the war has become embedded in the Russian political system.
Speaking to Russian naval personnel about civilians who produce camouflage nets, clothing and other supplies for the military, Putin said:
“Several times I heard surprising words: ‘The special military operation will end — what will we do?’”
The original phrase was: “СВО закончится — чем мы будем заниматься?”
Formally, Putin attributed the question to other people. He also stated that the war would end “sooner or later.” Taken literally, this gives the Kremlin room to deny that Putin was advocating an endless war. The transcript nevertheless shows that he immediately praised the unity and social purpose created by the war and argued that this condition should be preserved.
The rhetorical construction is precisely what makes the statement important.
Putin placed the thought in someone else’s mouth, creating a safe distance from it, and then endorsed the political condition it expressed. He presented anxiety about the end of the war as something emerging organically from ordinary people already absorbed into the war effort.
This allowed him to advance his own dilemma without stating it directly: what will Putin’s system do when the war ends?
The remark can therefore be read as a carefully borrowed confession. Putin did not explicitly say, “I do not know what to do without the war.” Instead, he claimed to hear this concern from citizens whose lives had become organised around military production and support.
Their supposed anxiety then legitimised his argument that the unity, structures and emotions created by the war must survive.
For the Kremlin, war now performs several indispensable domestic functions. It supplies the regime with heroes and traitors. It justifies repression, censorship and extraordinary spending. It channels social frustration towards an external enemy and converts sacrifice into evidence of political loyalty.
Peace would create more dangerous questions.
Russian society could ask what the war achieved, why so many people died and why the promised victory remained elusive. Veterans would return to civilian life. Regional governments would have to absorb the consequences of casualties, recruitment bonuses and social disruption. Military industries would face uncertainty. The regime would lose the permanent emergency through which it explains its failures.
The possibility that Putin himself does not know how to govern without war must therefore be taken seriously.
This does not mean that he will automatically order a conventional invasion of NATO territory. It means that prolonged or expanding confrontation serves the internal stability of his political system.
For the Kremlin, peace may not be a reward. It may be a problem.
Not the Baltics alone
The Baltic states are the most obvious testing ground for Russian escalation. Their geography is difficult, their populations are limited, and their proximity to Russia and Belarus creates permanent military pressure.
But the future security of Europe cannot be built around the defence of the Baltic states alone.
A Russian attack would immediately affect the entire Alliance. Reinforcements would have to move through Poland, Germany and the Nordic region. Missiles, cyberattacks and sabotage could target ports, railways, energy systems and command centres far beyond the battlefield.
Casualties would have to be evacuated towards hospitals throughout Europe. Atlantic ports and distant national transport systems would become parts of the eastern front’s logistical structure.
The answer must be security decentralisation.
The 10 July 2024 Washington Summit Declaration already committed NATO to strengthening its ability to move, reinforce, supply and sustain forces through resilient logistics and military-mobility corridors. It also recognised that national and collective resilience are essential foundations of credible deterrence.
But security decentralisation must go further than improving a limited number of major transport routes.
It requires dispersed ammunition and fuel stocks rather than dependence on a handful of depots. It means regional air-defence networks, multiple command nodes, protected data backups and alternative communications systems.
It requires medical hubs and evacuation routes extending from the Baltic states through Central and Western Europe to countries far from the immediate theatre of war.
It also means decentralising information resilience.
Russian narratives must not be countered only by specialised institutions in Riga, Tallinn or Vilnius. Local governments, media organisations, churches, schools and civil-society networks across every NATO country must be prepared for information attacks adapted to their own audiences.
Portugal may not face the same immediate territorial threat as Estonia. But Portuguese ports, hospitals, aircraft, soldiers and public opinion could become part of an Article 5 operation. The same applies to Spain, Italy, France, the Netherlands and every other member of the Alliance.
The Baltic states can provide experience, intelligence and early warning. They cannot provide strategic depth for the entire continent.
Russia’s method is to identify central points of failure and apply pressure until political unity breaks. Europe’s answer must be a system with no single point of failure.
The next confrontation may begin with a drone over Latvia, a cyberattack in Germany, a church narrative in Estonia or sabotage against a railway in Poland.
Its outcome, however, could depend on an airfield in Portugal, a hospital in France, a port in the Netherlands or a government decision in Washington.