Si vis pacem para bellum
The military adage that avoiding war requires preparing for it is as true today as it was for previous generations. For NATO, in the shadow of the ongoing war in Ukraine, this means considering scenarios of Russian aggression that may seem remote at the moment, but become more plausible over time. Given that Putin’s Russia has made clear a desire to reassert control over former territories and committed significant blood and treasure to the dream, the Alliance must take Putin at his word, and prepare for multiple scenarios in a generational conflict.
The conflict is ongoing in the cyber and propaganda domains, and in hybrid warfare in Syria, Africa, and elsewhere. The war in Ukraine demonstrates, however, that major conventional war remains in the Russian strategic tool kit, and Putin likely thinks it’s worked so far. Absent a strategic defeat and the advent of a more pacifist government in Moscow, the prospects for future revanchist campaigns against NATO member states are not zero.
Is NATO prepared to fight, and therefore to deter, defensive wars against Russian aggression? While some fear that the war in Ukraine could escalate into a broader NATO-Russia war, both sides seem intent on avoiding that eventuality for now. Yet if the war settles into a protracted stalemate or, worse, ends on terms that reward Russian aggression, the prospects for other revanchist conflicts will grow over time. Western military planners must understand and measure their readiness against them. This issue of the Defense Journal aims to provide a rough assessment of NATO’s readiness through the mental exercise of imagining three conflict scenarios that could embroil the Alliance in a direct combat against Russia in the coming two decades. The scenarios vary by scope and intensity, as well as location. Each presents a challenge to existing NATO readiness, and can therefore provide a useful parameter for debates on future resourcing, organizing, and exercising for the Alliance.
Assumptions
A thought exercise measuring capabilities against plausible threats inevitably entails assumptions about change over time. The following ones inform possible conflict scenarios with Russia, assuming that:
1) Russia does not suffer strategic defeat or failure in the near to medium term in Ukraine, and recovers its massive losses in equipment through new mobilization and spending;
2) military coordination and cooperation among China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran continues to deepen in the coming years;
3) Western risk aversion regarding escalatory or retaliatory steps against Russia continue; and
4) Russia and other anti-Western powers privilege conflict, mobilization, and resistance spending whereas Western powers struggle to maintain the goal of 2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) for defense spending, and the United States faces growing budgetary pressure due to debt obligations.
These assumptions frame potential conventional conflicts between Russia as less unequal than a direct Russia versus NATO aggregate comparison of economic, demographic, and industrial potential. It thus avoids a temptation to wish away the threat by assuming Russia sees the asymmetry and would not tempt fate. Yet Russia does not stand alone in its drive to undermine Western power, and may see itself as more agile, subtle, ruthless, and politically unified than its targets—and better prepared for a long war.
For ease of analysis, Defense Journal excludes scenarios that would require significant geopolitical or internal political shifts to appear plausible. These would include a direct Russian attack on larger NATO member states in the north (Poland, Finland, Norway), the central area (Romania, Hungary, Slovakia), or the south (Turkey).
Pacing scenario 1: Baltic war
A group of retired senior military officers earlier this year laid out how a Russian attack through the strip of land between Poland and Lithuania could launch an effort to detach the Baltic states from their NATO allies to the west. The rationale for the attack would be to fulfill Vladimir Putin’s ambition to regain control of former Soviet territories for an expanded Russian Federation. In the experts’ view, rising defense budgets and force expansion underway in Russia comport more with a Baltic reconquista than with the scope of the current war in Ukraine.
Such a war would likely begin with massive cyber and missile attacks against key headquarters, logistics nodes, and communication assets of NATO military forces. A key point of the assault would be for Russia to seize the Suwalki gap, connecting its Kaliningrad exclave with proxy Belarus. Naval combat, perhaps including seizure of Baltic islands Bornholm and Gotland (in Denmark and Sweden, respectively) would provide distractions to NATO forces and impede reinforcement to the targets of the ground invasion.
Within a few years, this scenario could include waves of unmanned tank and armored vehicle attacks on land, and naval drones on sea coordinated via artificial intelligence programs, similar to the unmanned aerial vehicle attacks already on display in Ukraine. It could also include seizing key terrain in the Arctic to impede NATO logistical and commercial traffic along the northern seas. The ultimate goal would not be conquering larger NATO members’ territory outright, but raising the costs for them to oppose reassertion of Russian control over newer members, over which Moscow nurtures irredentist aims.
There are some scenario-specific assumptions involved here. The first would be that Russia achieves a draw or stalemate in Ukraine, so that it considers its gamble has paid off. The second is that dissent in the United States and Europe over defense obligations to the Baltic states rises to a level that encourages the Russians to accept the risk of a major gambit.
Scenario 2: Moldova and onward
Given the lack of a direct land border at present between the Russian Federation and the eastern bank of Moldova (occupied Transnistria), this scenario likely qualifies as a sequel to Russian victory in the current war in Ukraine. Unlike the first scenario, this would proceed from successful assertion of substantial, or total, Russian control along the northern coast of the Black Sea. In that event, the 1,500 or so Russian soldiers in Transnistria would no longer be isolated from supporting forces to the east. Were Ukraine to be beaten into a bad peace—potentially even losing the port of Odessa—possibilities open up in Moldova.
The Russians are already conducting political warfare against Moldova. Moscow’s intelligence service, the FSB, has drawn up a ten-year plan to destabilize the country and reorient it away from the West. Part of that plan involves framing Moldovan independence as irredentist Romanian intrigue against the people of Moldova, who by the FSB script gravitate more naturally to the Russian cultural sphere. An attack on Moldova could begin with a coup attempt from pro-Russia elements infiltrated into the national capital, Chişinău, or an appeal for protection from pro-Russian separatists in the Transnistrian regional capital, Tiraspol.
Moldova is not a NATO member, but it has a close partnership with the Alliance (and seeks to join the European Union). If conditions in Ukraine allowed a Russian reinforcement to Transnistria and intervention in Moldova proper, the Alliance could be faced with a replay of the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine: sabotage, undeclared Russian forces operating in the guise of local volunteers, and forcible seizure of facilities and territory. There would be significant potential for spillover into NATO territory (Romania), and an unpalatable choice between tolerating a Russian fait accompli or intervening directly at the risk of escalation into a major NATO-Russia war in which Moscow portrays the West as the aggressor.
This scenario depends in large measure on significant deterioration of Ukraine’s military position, potentially including new territorial losses from 2025 onward. This could lead to Kyiv ceding ground—and strategic decoupling from the West—to salvage formal independence. Were the Russians to extend control across southern Ukraine and into Moldova while the West dithered, increased Russian hybrid war in the western Balkans would be a possible further consequence.
Scenario 3: Black Sea drone swarms
One surprising development during the current Ukraine war has been Kyiv’s ability, despite the lack of conventional naval vessels, to use sea drones, missiles, and small boats to deny much of the Black Sea to Russian ships and destroy a third of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. In a third scenario for war between NATO and Russia, Moscow might seek to turn the tables in the coming years by expanding its own inventory of asymmetric naval weapons and turning them against Western commercial and naval shipping.
The Russians have already understood the vulnerability of modern shipping and naval forces—especially aircraft carriers—to cheap and numerous container-launched missiles and drones. Iran has become a prolific producer of cheap drones, and is helping Russia build a drone inventory “orders of magnitude larger” than what it had before 2022. Russia has identified a potential “permanent presence” of NATO ships in the Black Sea as a military threat—and certainly has developed plans to deal with that threat. At the same time, Western military leaders have identified Russia’s continued attempts to strangle the Ukrainian economy at sea as creating a risk for war.
In a sense we have seen the creation of overlapping anti-access and area denial (A2AD) zones in the Black Sea region, one enforced by the West and Ukraine against Russia, the other by Russia against Ukraine—and in future perhaps against the West. In the coming years, Russian and Iranian advantages in the production of cheap and numerous systems could create a temptation for Moscow to direct a massive attack against ships and coastal facilities of NATO countries that would mitigate, or negate, the Alliance’s clear advantage on the Black, Baltic, or Mediterranean seas. 2024 has seen Houthi forces in Yemen significantly decrease shipping through the Red Sea and even fire missiles at Israel, and it doesn’t take too great a creative leap to multiply that in scope and ambition on more northerly seas. In a war pitting an adversary equipped with cheap and plentiful systems against one with few and sophisticated systems, the West is not currently well-positioned to win.
Upshot
Each of these planning scenarios suffers missing links in the causal chains or incentive structures required for probability, but the same might be said of arguments in 2021 that Putin intended to launch a massive new invasion of Ukraine. Intent and capability to carry out threats change over time, but the initial step for security experts is to think through possible scenarios, not assume them away, and to inform prudent steps to prepare for a range of threats. As NATO has relearned, based on Ukraine’s experience, the goal of the Alliance must be to repel not expel threats—and these scenarios provide a measure of how ready it is to do so.
Rich Outzen is a geopolitical consultant and nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Turkey with thirty-two years of government service both in uniform and as a civilian. Follow him on X @RichOutzen.
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Image: Army Gen. Darryl Williams, commander of US Army Europe and Africa and NATO Land Command, right center, discusses mission execution with senior officers from NATO HQ Allied Rapid Reaction Corps during Exercise Steadfast Jupiter in Romania, Oct. 18, 2023. Photo credit: Army Staff Sgt. Kyle Larsen