It is hard to read the Danish intelligence assessment and come away comfortable. Issued this week in Copenhagen, it raised the prospect of a Russian missile attack on NATO infrastructure used to support Ukraine — an attack that, by the report’s account, could come within weeks. The risk of isolated long-range strikes on facilities vital to helping Ukraine is “low but growing,” the Defence Intelligence Service found, even as the same assessment concluded there is no sign the Kremlin plans an outright invasion of a NATO state, a move the Danes said would take a minimum of six months to prepare, according to Breaking Defense. The warning landed, as a limited Russian strike has come to be seen as a live risk, into a Europe already counting incidents.
“What’s pretty clear from public intelligence briefings by … a number of heads of state and defence secretaries across different member states is that Russia is planning [some] sort of aggression, probably with multiple potential forms,” said Justin Bronk, senior research fellow for airpower and technology at the Royal United Services Institute in London. “That doesn’t mean they’ve decided to do it — but it does mean it’s probably under active planning and therefore the risk of it has risen significantly.”
Others are less measured. Moscow is “cooking up something big this year,” Poland’s foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, told a panel at the UN General Assembly on Friday. He did not elaborate.
A month of incidents
Germany’s government has blamed Vladimir Putin directly for an attempted drone strike on Leipzig’s airport, aimed, Berlin believes, at aircraft carrying supplies to Kyiv. A Russian drone struck a Ukrainian passenger train near the Polish border just as it unloaded a carriage of European VIPs, among them Boris Johnson; Russia confirmed the strike while denying it was an assassination attempt on diplomats. Polish authorities said they strongly suspect Kremlin agents set fire to a satellite communications ground station that serves as a critical link to Ukraine’s armed forces.
Putin has denied everything, and blamed NATO, as he has through most of his 27 years at the top of Russian power. “NATO is swelling up and expanding,” he told a Kremlin meeting on September 18, and Europe’s leaders were “simply trying to salvage their sagging ratings, and cover up mistakes” by accusing Russia. He said much the same in the winter of 2022, while the troops piled up on Ukraine’s border. That is the memory that gives this autumn its chill.
What the warnings leave out
And yet the facts on the ground refuse to line up neatly with 2022. “We have no signs indicating that Russia currently intends to militarily attack any NATO ally,” wrote Tarmo Miilits, the top official at Estonia’s Interior Ministry. Britain’s Times quoted senior European security officials saying there is “no new intelligence to suggest a Russian attack is coming.” Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb, in New York, asked everyone to stop the “alarmist language” — the speculation, he argued, is precisely what Kremlin spin doctors want.
There is also Russia’s own arithmetic to consider. Four and a half years of full-scale war are believed to have cost Moscow as many as 1.4 million dead and wounded, and its economy is under severe strain. A senior Estonian commander on Friday described Putin as a “rat in the corner,” dangerous precisely because the war goes badly. The same day, the state outlet RIA Novosti published a story titled “Russia is facing another short SVO” — the Kremlin’s term for the war. “It will be short,” it promised, floating missile strikes on Lithuania and noting nuclear weapons were not off the table. The story was taken down within hours, with a correction explaining that it “did not align with the editorial team’s views,” or the “state policy of the Russian federation.” Konstantin Medvedev has made such threats often enough that analysts file them as theatre.
The analysts’ model of what Moscow might do is not invasion but something smaller, calibrated to a hair. “The Russians aren’t going to do something that they think leads to a long, difficult war. That’s not their objective,” Bronk said. “The objective would be to do something small enough that it still definitively violates NATO territory to test the alliance visibly, but keep it small enough that it becomes very difficult to get the political will to respond directly and militarily kick them out.”
Which returns the question, as it always returns, to Article 5 — invoked exactly once in the alliance’s 77 years, by the United States after 9/11. Britain did not invoke it after the 2018 Novichok attempt on Sergei Skripal left a military-grade nerve agent scattered around Salisbury. Turkey came close under artillery fire from Syria and did not. Latvia’s president, Edgars Rinkēvičs, told Channel 4 he absolutely believes the U.S. and the other 30 allies would come, but here the certainty thins, because Donald Trump’s long-term commitment to the alliance remains contested and populist parties keep testing the solidarity on which it rests. Invoke Article 5, receive nothing, and deterrence dies of the reference.
“The real trouble starts when you have to define when Article 5 starts in this situation,” Rinkēvičs said. “Hybrid attacks could result in Article 5 but this is where we need to work together.”