The Baltic countries spent years warning western European governments about underestimating the threat Russia posed to the east.
Ironically, after being proved right by the invasion of Ukraine, the Baltic trio – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – now have to tamp down alarm about Moscow mulling a military attack on an EU state.
It is understandable that public anxieties are on edge. The discovery of a drone carrying explosives in Leipzig airport last month appeared to represent a fresh escalation in Moscow’s “hybrid war”. The German government took the unusual step of directly attributing the attempted attack to Russia, which Moscow denied.
A well-documented trail of arson attacks, sabotage, rogue drone disruptions and other suspicious incidents on European soil point back towards Russia. It would seem the modus operandi is to spread fear while maintaining plausible deniability.
What about an actual military attack?
Russia’s FSB security services instituted a temporary curfew in two districts near the Estonian border, beside Narva, in recent days. That naturally led online commentators to ask what was going on.
CIA director John Ratcliffe’s surprise visit to Moscow a couple of weeks ago followed a US intelligence assessment – details reported by the Wall Street Journal – speculating that Russian president Vladimir Putin might try to test Nato resolve in the next few years. And last week Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk told parliament Russia could fire missiles or drones at European targets near Ukrainian territory and then claim the attacks were accidental.
But the prospect of Russian tanks and troops streaming across into Narva, Vilnius or Poland, even as part of some limited incursion, is extremely low – for the foreseeable future anyway.
Latvia’s national security bureau, SAB, released a statement assuring people “the likelihood of a conventional attack on the Baltic States and Nato is currently and in the near future very low”.
Russia’s army is tied up in Ukraine, suffering steep casualties for small, grinding gains in the eastern Donbas region. Putin may announce a mobilisation to draft recruits this autumn and replenish military ranks.
There is no known intelligence to suggest Moscow is preparing to open a second front in the war. Russian troop levels near the EU’s eastern border may be at their lowest ever because so many are fighting in Ukraine.
“They haven’t got the numbers,” said John Foreman, a former UK government defence attache who was posted to Moscow from 2019 to 2022, the year of the full-scale invasion. “This is not 2022. There are no significant Russian troops anywhere near the border.
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“All this war talk is a big distraction. In 2022 people didn’t want to believe there would be an invasion, now the confirmation bias is going the other way,” he said.
The more immediate danger, Foreman argues, is Russia’s ability to exploit divisions within Europe through sabotage, disinformation and political interference.
Foreman said Russia would need 10 years to fully reconstitute its army and economy after the Ukraine war ends and would have to garrison large numbers of troops across occupied land it captured in the Donbas in any truce scenario as well.
That’s no reason to be complacent. For Irish people, the danger feels very far removed. But other European countries, particularly those neighbouring Russia and its ally Belarus, are spending vast sums to rearm their militaries and stiffen defences to deter Putin.
The invasion of Ukraine should not have caught anyone by surprise.
The UK and US governments were sounding the alarm about a troop build-up, privately and publicly, for months before February 2022, warning Putin was plotting an invasion. “We had incredible intelligence ... Something’s up lads,” Foreman recalled.
Paris, Berlin and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy were reluctant to heed those warnings. “They didn’t keep their minds open,” said Foreman.
[ Russian actions ‘reckless and dangerous’ says EU after Baltic security incidentsOpens in new window ]
Senior sources in the Estonian government are confident their intelligence networks have a very accurate read on what’s going on across their border. If there is cause for concern the Baltic countries will be shouting from the rooftops.
The chance of a future Russian military attack on an EU state would increase significantly if Ukraine’s defences collapsed and Russia won the war outright.
The Kremlin has a high tolerance for risk. Putin gambled Russian forces would steamroll Ukraine in a couple of weeks. His so-called special military operation turned into a deadlocked 4½-year war that doesn’t look like it will end any time soon.
The campaign of hybrid interference and sabotage in Europe will continue, pitched below the level triggering Nato’s article five, the common defence clause of the western military alliance.
It is easy to imagine Russia making a grave miscalculation when operating inside this “grey zone”. Perhaps a bomb intended to damage infrastructure instead kills multiple civilians in Warsaw, Tallinn or Madrid, necessitating a forceful European response. That would pull everyone into uncharted territory.
