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I Was the Russian Commander in a War Game. This Is How I Defeated NATO.

Decision paralysis and divisions among alliance members were easy to exploit.

Foreign Policy
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I Was the Russian Commander in a War Game. This Is How I Defeated NATO.

With Ukraine stabilizing the front line and striking more and more targets deep inside Russia—while Russia’s spring offensive has hit a wall—perhaps it is true what Col. Nicholson said in The Bridge on the River Kwai: “Suddenly you realize you’re nearer the end than the beginning.”

With prospects that the war may be approaching a ceasefire, if only a temporary one, toward the end of this year or in 2027, European policymakers should be clear-eyed that once the fighting stops in Ukraine, Europe will enter its most dangerous period vis-à-vis Russia. Europe’s military capabilities—and thus ability to deter—will likely be at their weakest point relative to Russian power. Allies will face a Russian military that has grown in size, absorbed nearly five years of combat experience by then, and built real advantages that Europe has been slow to match and will need years to catch up to, especially stand-off warfare and dynamic targeting from behind the front line. What’s more, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s only instrument for forcing his demands to restore Moscow’s Soviet-era sphere of influence is his military. Europe thus faces a hammer-and-nail dilemma: For Putin, every problem looks like one that he can solve with war. That makes the risks very clear.

It is thus worth revisiting my role in a December 2025 war game, when I attacked NATO and won. That is, I played the role of the Russian chief of the general staff in a war game at a German military college. Although the game involved battles, it was not an operational war game testing a campaign plan, military doctrine, or force design. Rather, the focus was on political decision-making. My task as a member of the Red Team was to create a military crisis on NATO’s eastern flank and force the Blue Team, the German government, to react to it. By attacking Lithuania in my first move, I so overwhelmed German political and military decision-making that NATO’s most important European ally did nothing.

Held at the German Bundeswehr’s Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg and produced as a podcast by the Berlin newspaper Die Welt, the war game received outsized media attention—including when a journalist asked NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte about its outcome during a press conference.

The interior of a dimly lit, modern operations center filled with multiple computer monitors and large wall displays. Personnel in military uniforms sit at workstations, and one woman in the foreground gazes toward the screens. The displays show various digital maps, aircraft footage, and organizational logos.

The interior of a dimly lit, modern operations center filled with multiple computer monitors and large wall displays. Personnel in military uniforms sit at workstations, and one woman in the foreground gazes toward the screens. The displays show various digital maps, aircraft footage, and organizational logos.

French soldiers participate in a NATO war game exercise at an airbase near Lyon, France, on Dec. 3, 2025. Olivier Chassignole/AFP via Getty Images

To beat and essentially break NATO, I focused on three simple points where I believe Russia holds an advantage.

First, speed. The fundamental problem for NATO is that in a military scenario involving one or more of its Baltic members, Russia will already have a large number of troops in the area. NATO, as of 2026, does not. Along the Russian and Belarusian border with NATO, sizable Russian formations will be positioned in the event of a crisis. NATO, by contrast, needs time—days at best, weeks or more at worst—to bring up reinforcements. Second, if Russia acts quickly, it can seize ground in a limited offensive before a counter-attack materializes. Third, Russia should be able to hold that ground and threaten to escalate to the nuclear level, deterring NATO from counterattacking. Why do I believe this? Because Germany’s political leaders dare not pose a fundamental question head-on: Would they actually risk a direct war, possibly a nuclear one, against Russia for a Baltic state?

The scenario was pretty straightforward, if not to say standard, for these types of games: After a hypothetical Russia-Ukraine ceasefire in the summer of 2026, Moscow offers Berlin economic cooperation and a return to pre-war relations, even as the Kremlin escalates its threats against the Baltic states and claims that there is a humanitarian crisis in Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave. Following joint Belarusian-Russian military exercises in western Belarus, NATO observes that Russia and Belarus keep 12,000 soldiers stationed there. Vilnius warns of an impending “emergency” in Kaliningrad. The war game begins at the end of October 2026 with Russian troops still in Belarus.

The first question I asked “Putin” as the Red Team military leader was whether that was all the troops I had at my disposal. I was told no. So I quickly went about expanding my attacking force, drawing from four Russian combined arms armies to maximize our military options. There was the anvil from Kaliningrad: the 11th Army Corps. The hammer from Belarus: elements of the 1st Guards Tank Army, around 12,000 troops as the advance force, combined with elements of the 76th Guards Air Assault Division and several thousand troops in support. Right behind them would be the 20th Guards Combined Arms Army to provide mass and flank protection against Poland, while the 6th Combined Arms Army from the Leningrad Military District would tie down NATO forces in Estonia and Latvia on the northern flank.

A close-up of several individuals in camouflage military uniforms seated at a table. One man in the center looks intensely toward another person whose back is partially to the camera. On the table, several papers with tactical diagrams and a pair of binoculars are visible.

A close-up of several individuals in camouflage military uniforms seated at a table. One man in the center looks intensely toward another person whose back is partially to the camera. On the table, several papers with tactical diagrams and a pair of binoculars are visible.

Russian President Vladimir Putin inspects joint Russian-Belarusian military drills at a training ground in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, Russia, on Sept. 16, 2025.Sergei Bobylyov/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

The plan was simple: Elements of the 1st Guards Tank Army and the 76th Air Assault Division would push from Grodno, Belarus, through Druskininkai, Lithuania, northward toward Marijampole, Lithuania. Simultaneously, the 11th Army Corps would advance with a couple of thousand troops eastward from Kaliningrad. Within 24 hours, they were to link up at Marijampole with the 20th Guards Combined Arms Army securing the flanks of that force. Once that is achieved, a second echelon of forces would move in and dig in. The Baltics would then be effectively cut off from Poland and the rest of NATO.

All of this would be preceded by special operation forces trying to secure important bridges and intersections needed for the advance. The Russian force would be mobilized under the cover of military exercises with troops leaving and going over months and leaving equipment behind in select assembly areas.

My two Red Team colleagues—Alexander Gabuev, the director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, who played Putin, and Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven, a former German diplomat and intelligence official, who played Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov—in a sense dictated all of this with their political strategy. We went through the military plan in an online meeting a week before the game. Our objective: Destroy NATO but keep the Americans out. Put otherwise: Render NATO discredited and incapable of keeping Russia from dictating the terms of a new security order in Europe. The main objective was therefore to destroy the credibility of NATO and the European Union through a limited incursion. Hybrid warfare alone, although it played an important role in the run up to the conventional campaign, would not get us there. Why not use the best instrument in our arsenal, Russian conventional military power? Taking my cue from what Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby told the Europeans at this year’s Munich Security Conference, I wanted to stay clear of hitting Americans—at least deliberately—to make sure Washington would stay out and tell the Europeans to take the lead. In the game this worked. In reality, of course, this could theoretically turn out different.

The game designers, from what I gathered, did not anticipate a conventional attack; perhaps their focus was on Russian hybrid warfare involving “little green men” like in Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. But a conventional attack seemed reasonable given the state of NATO defenses in Lithuania and how fast I would expect at least a part of Russia’s forces to reconstitute after a potential ceasefire in Ukraine. Learning from Ukraine and drawing on the much improved Russian military proficiency in dynamic targeting to prevent a NATO counterattack through the Suwalki Gap, I would turn the corridor into a kill zone by exercising fire control through drones integrated with artillery, with permanent surveillance and hundreds of strike drones and mine-laying drones supported by a robust air and missile defense umbrella.

A large, colorful relief map lies on a grassy field, enclosed by a white concrete frame. The map features sections of yellow, green, and blue, marked with various tactical symbols, small flags, and miniature military models. A person in camouflage uniform leans over the map, placing a small white marker near a cluster of symbols.

A large, colorful relief map lies on a grassy field, enclosed by a white concrete frame. The map features sections of yellow, green, and blue, marked with various tactical symbols, small flags, and miniature military models. A person in camouflage uniform leans over the map, placing a small white marker near a cluster of symbols.

A Ukrainian officer examines a large tactical map during military exercises near Rivne, Ukraine, on Sept. 18, 2008.Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images

I knew that as long as we kept the Americans out for 48 hours, there was little risk of an immediate European response. European NATO forces would certainly not attack without first degrading Russian air defenses, which they could not do in the fall of 2026 given the limited offensive power of their air forces and a lack of SEAD/DEAD capabilities, including the shortage of anti-radiation missiles and the lack of equipment for breaching operations. These known European shortcomings were exactly why I had the Russians dig in and fortify the corridor immediately once the incursion was successful. I asked repeatedly during the game: Is no NATO counterattack coming? But no NATO forces were anywhere to be seen.

I certainly pointed out to my political leaders that the attack came with a high risk of failure. The roads in Lithuania are narrow, and there are too few of them. The surrounding terrain is forested and partly swampy. There are chokepoints where our advance could certainly have been stopped. And there were at least two brigade-sized Lithuanian troop formations to deal with during the initial incursion. I planned to degrade these with a combination of drone and artillery strikes, given their and NATO’s lack of adequate drone countermeasures and air defense.

The game ended before a NATO counterattack and before the Lithuanians mounted a counterstrike. Had those played out, a Russian failure would have been possible and perhaps likely. But the question of whether a counterattack might cause Russia’s plan to collapse misses military reality: In an age of drone, artillery, and missile proliferation, Russia does not need to physically control terrain in order to cut off the Baltics. It can exercise fire control with long-range precision strikes, rocket artillery, drones, and remote mining. Exercising fire control over the Suwalki Gap today is much easier for Russia than over the Ukrainian frontline in 2023 and 2024. Since then, Russia has made great strides in dynamic targeting, and this advantage would be boosted by the absence of U.S.-deployed SEAD/DEAD capabilities during the first 48 hours of a Russian operation.

Strategically, the war game’s successful incursion into Lithuania was a nice add-on, but whether it failed or succeeded was of secondary importance when even fire control from outside Lithuania’s borders can cut off the Baltics from the rest of NATO and impose a dilemma on NATO decision-making. If Washington holds back to let the Europeans take the lead, will they accept excessive casualties caused by their lack of U.S.-level capabilities to disintegrate Russian air defense and ground-based precision strike complexes in a counterattack? Would the Europeans still attack—or yield to Russian political demands in order to avoid a potential bloodbath? Would Poland attack on its own, despite those missing capabilities? In the event of a NATO counterattack, I had prepared a plan that used nuclear brinkmanship to frighten the German political leadership: The activation of tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, Kaliningrad, and western Russia would have accompanied an ultimatum that the corridor was not negotiable. We did not need that phase in the game. We achieved our objectives without it by paralyzing the German political leadership while the Americans stayed out.

In total, the operation drew on roughly 100,000 Russian troops in the wider theater, including air defense, logistics, aviation, and second‑echelon formations. Of those, about 12,000 ground troops formed the forward advance force from Belarus on the main axis, reinforced by a few thousand additional maneuver elements from Kaliningrad. I also realized that without an immediate U.S. response—such as air strikes against Russian forces in Kaliningrad, Belarus, and Lithuania—an attack on NATO in the Baltics is in some respects militarily simpler than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The distances are shorter, the military objectives more limited, and Russia’s opponents—at least in the initial phase—weaker, even if they constitute the most powerful military alliance in the world.

But above all, what I take away is that Germany and especially its political leaders must confront uncomfortable yet fundamental questions if Europe is to persevere in such a crisis. Forget the sermons about being committed to NATO’s Article 5. The single, underlying question is whether Germany believes that it’s worth going to war with Russia over the Baltics, even without U.S. help. Is there a genuine consensus on an answer to this question? Is Berlin willing, in the extreme, to endure Putin’s nuclear brinkmanship? Are Germans mentally ready for war?

If those questions cannot be clearly answered before a crisis takes place, then Germany and NATO risk being simply overwhelmed by Russia’s speed and resolve in a real-world military crisis, especially during the initial phase. Deterrence depends not only on military capabilities—which are lacking—but also on what the enemy believes about your resolve. In the war game, my “Russian” colleagues and I knew: Germany will likely hesitate. And that was enough to win.

Original Source

Foreign Policy

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