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.
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
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.
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
