“These stories are, at best, a Russian psy-op in which Western media is participating for clicks,” said a senior Baltic defence insider. “At the moment, on a conventional level, there is nothing serious happening.”
The insider suggested that: “The heightened speculation is partly a bid for the attention of a United States wavering on its NATO commitments, not least following President Trump’s public criticism of the alliance. But even without firm American help, the Baltics would hold their own against a depleted Russian army.”
The massive disparity in size between Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian forces compared to Russia is certainly important but does not mean that Russia can walk into any of those states. “Even against a Russian army in far better shape than today’s, the Baltic states hold strategic deterrents, including High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) that can strike deep into Russia or obliterate Kaliningrad,” a source close to the UK Ministry of Defence told us. “They have significant mobilisation capacity and plans in place to react fast.”
There is a lack of understanding of Baltic capability and determination, we were told. “It’s a bit out of touch of them to make the assumptions they do. The Baltics are not a backwater,” a retired Eastern European diplomat said. “This is not Crimea. If any green men turn up, they’re dead.”
The real threat is asymmetrical, we were told. It is not a conventional invasion or series of belligerent acts but rather those sub-threshold activities which probe deeper into the grey area and blur the line triggering an Article 5 response.
“It’s the grey-area attacks by Russia everywhere in NATO countries that we should be worried about,” said a former national security advisor in an Eastern flank NATO country. “We do not have the proper means to respond to those, and Russia knows it. The overt military aspect is not our weakness, including in the Baltics.”
Sub-threshold activity is already evident on NATO soil. These include the arson attacks on Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s properties, now linked by British police to a Russian-directed campaign; a stray Russian drone exploding in the Romanian city of Galați ; sabotage against infrastructure in France, Germany and Poland. All are of concern to NATO but none trigger its collective defence machinery.
The Baltics and Nordics, at least, are not waiting for NATO. The two regions have developed a military co-operation and integration that goes beyond NATO agreements, the former national security advisor noted. “The Nordics’ joint air force will help the Baltic countries in the event of an attack before the rest of NATO. They created additional assurances because everyone can see that NATO may not be going well.”
Even talk of an invasion into an unspecified Baltic state belongs to the hybrid warfare playbook. “The discourse over the recent weeks is a form of intimidation. It’s part of the hybrid game: it creates panic, so it’s not without substance. The Russians obtain notable results from it,” a UK-based Russia watcher told us. “But I don’t see them moving from sub-threshold to more serious military activity.”
Why the confidence that Moscow stays below the threshold? The Russia watcher argues that Moscow knows that it can no longer afford more – in resources or political capital, particularly domestically. “The official strategic objectives of Russia have not changed: they remain a version of the restoration of the Tsarist Empire at its maximum. But the chasm between goal and capability is growing by the day, and this is the source of considerable instability inside Russia.”
The symptoms of how far Russia has been stretched are increasingly visible: no air defence over major cities, a collapsing economy, the return of mass corruption and racketeering, internet and banking shutdowns and, most recently, sustained Ukrainian strikes against energy infrastructure that have produced a national fuel shortage. “The instability makes it difficult for Russia to look too far or too ambitiously ahead,” the Russia watcher said. “Any big Russian moves this summer or autumn, such as a new conventional mobilisation, would likely be directed at Ukraine, not on a new front.”
Hybrid warfare, by contrast, is cheap and could spread south of Ukraine. Our sources were concerned that countries including “Moldova, Bulgaria and Romania could all be further exposed”, the Eastern European diplomat told us. “It’s a great way to create further distractions, no Article 5 and who in the West cares about them?”.
“Serbia presents a different kind of opening: not a target, but a platform. It is very friendly to Russia and could easily be used to launch further hybrid operations across the region: classical sabotage, the stirring of ethnic tensions, covert support for extremist political movements, the training of mercenaries,” the former national security advisor told us.
The region’s energy infrastructure forms a natural target list: the Balkan branches of the Azeri-Turkish gas corridor, the Vertical Corridor carrying US LNG and Romania’s Neptun Deep offshore gas project “could be, and probably already are, on the list for Russian interference, both at the physical and the socio-political levels.”
The hybrid toolkit is expanding, too. The UK Ministry of Defence source pointed to the deepening co-operation between Russian intelligence and criminal elements inside NATO countries. “They don’t need their own forces. They can just rent them. There are hacker collectives working with the GRU [Russian military intelligence] to cause billions of dollars of damage, armed organised crime groups committing sabotage and even political assassinations for cryptocurrency payments from Moscow. The Kremlin is testing NATO every day.”
The tanks, in other words, are not coming. But everything else is already in play to varying degrees — and Field’s sources expect more of it, in more of Europe.