Russia is already challenging NATO, former officials say

Russia is already challenging NATO below the threshold of armed conflict and could seek to test the alliance directly, with the Baltic states a likely theatre, former senior allied officials have said.

Speaking at a Center for European Policy Analysis press briefing ahead of the Ankara summit, Jan Lipavský, the former Czech foreign minister, said a stalling front line in Ukraine could push the Kremlin towards escalation elsewhere to sustain its war narrative. “Vladimir Putin will be seeking some kind of solution or escalation in a different kind of theatre, and that might be the Baltics,” he said.

“We are living in times when things which are possible are also happening. The fact that we don’t like it and we don’t want to see it doesn’t mean that Vladimir Putin won’t decide to test NATO.” Many such scenarios, he said, begin “under the red line,” spanning hybrid warfare, disruption in the maritime and electromagnetic domains and information warfare, and he noted that Russia is known to be planning a strengthened military posture in the region.

Asked about reported German assessments that Russia could be ready to challenge NATO in some form by 2029, Laura Galante, formerly the US intelligence community’s cyber executive, argued the framing understates the present. “Russia is already challenging NATO,” she said.

“Russia is actively contesting systems in the alliance all the time,” pointing to persistent attacks on the fused civilian and military infrastructure on which the alliance runs, from data centres and undersea cables to airports and rail, much of it in private hands and targeted not only by Russia but by China, Iran and criminal proxies. The shift from episodic incidents to permanent contestation, she said, means allies “are going to feel warfare below the threshold” that previous generations grew up recognising, and defending against it is “not a cyber problem, that’s an alliance problem,” requiring the 1.5 per cent infrastructure element of the alliance’s 5 per cent spending commitment to be married to genuine resilience under Article 3 of the treaty.

David Cattler, NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Intelligence and Security from 2019 to 2023, said he was not aware of any published alliance assessment behind the 2029 date, but that the geography of concern is consistent. “The closer you are to the eastern front with Russia, the more you feel like they could do something on a smaller scale, on a shorter timeline,” he said, warning that such action would strain not just the targeted nation but the alliance’s political and military decision-making and its corresponding response.