NATO Grapples With a New Long Game Against Putin

NATO is developing a political strategy to counter Russia under the assumption that the Kremlin’s foreign policy will stay Vladimir Putin-like—if not run by the Russian president himself—for the long term.

It’s a part of a broader NATO effort to move away from the post-Cold War peace dividend of the 1990s, when allies tried to placate Russia by establishing diplomatic relations and removing troops from Eastern Europe. After the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the allies must now find a way to deal with a Moscow that will almost certainly remain hostile and a threat to NATO for the foreseeable future.

“We all understand that Russia will not change, even when someone will replace Putin one day,” said Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur. “When there is no change on the political system level, then we will see no change.”

But across 32 nations, NATO needs to figure out what kind of plan it’s pursuing. Is it a containment strategy as the 71-year-old Putin ages? Do the allies wait for Putin to die?

Russia is already putting pressure on the West to break its consensus over Ukraine and soften anti-Kremlin tilt. Moscow has launched more concerted hybrid attacks than the alliance has seen at any point since the end of the Cold War, according to both current and former NATO officials. That effort has included cyberattacks, sending waves of immigrants to the border with Finland, removing border buoys along the Narva River with Estonia, suspected arson attacks, and assassination plots. 

Some of Russia’s actions over the course of the covert campaign might even rise to the threshold of armed conflict, but the first step, officials said, is to stay cool.

“Russia is trying to make us run around like wet hens and lose our heads,” said Tobias Billstrom, Sweden’s foreign minister. “These are attempts by the security services and the military forces of Russia to try and keep us busy, so that we will fail in our support to Ukraine and ultimately bow down to Russia’s wishes.”

The other prong in Russia’s plan to undermine NATO is an effort to continue to build its conventional strength. NATO expects Russia to field thousands more troops—to fight in Ukraine or elsewhere—by the time that the alliance’s new Russia strategy is ready. Moscow is still likely recruiting about 30,000 new troops a month, according to a senior NATO official. “They can probably continue to absorb these very high losses for quite some time,” added the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity based on ground rules set by the alliance. 

NATO estimates that Russia can continue to subsist in a wartime economy for at least another three to four years. Putin is banking on exhausting Ukraine with Russia’s greater numbers of troops and resources—even if there’s a staggering cost in lives. 

Yet the numerical edge hasn’t helped the Russians gain ground in Ukraine so far this year. NATO officials assess that Russia has not achieved a single one of its strategic objectives in Ukraine. The Kremlin’s offensive around Ukraine’s eastern city of Kharkiv has advanced several miles, but progress has mostly fallen off because Russia doesn’t have enough troops—or enough quality troops, said Royal Netherlands Navy Adm. Rob Bauer, the chair of NATO’s Military Committee. 

“The Ukrainians understand what they’re fighting for,” Bauer said. “The Russians have no clue.” He added that Russia had to take troops from another part of the front line to mount the Kharkiv offensive and didn’t have the proper trainers and training facilities that it needed to generate tough enough soldiers to break through Ukrainian lines. 

Both sides are looking for openings to launch another counteroffensive, but it’s not likely to take place until they deal with manpower shortages. Ukraine is also waiting for Western munitions to arrive en masse. Russia has improved its coordination of cruise and ballistic missiles with drones since the beginning of the war, too, in an effort to overwhelm Ukrainian defenses. 

But even as Russia has combined artillery, infantry, and air attacks in Ukraine, NATO officials believe that Moscow is still not conducting effective maneuver warfare that sees a precise sequence of shelling and tank thrusts before ground troops move ahead. 

“Ukraine is actually not a joint fight,” Bauer said. “It is actually a ground war, in essence. If they want to fight NATO, they need to do more than what they do now. They need to be able to fight with air, maritime, and land, and space, and cyber in a synchronized way, which we haven’t seen in Ukraine.” Russia would also need a combined military approach to fight NATO, Bauer said.

Western officials and experts believe that Russia will need to rebuild equipment, train more soldiers, and get proficient in new weapons systems to fully regenerate. Bauer said that Russia could get its military back in the shape it was before the Ukraine invasion within three to five years after the shooting stops, but getting to the status of a complete, modern military that could challenge the alliance with the threat of a full-scale invasion would take more time. 

And Russia is running out of its vast stocks of Soviet-era weaponry, forcing the Kremlin to limit its war aims. But it has also held back stocks of drones and missiles in order to conduct major attacks, such as the one on a Kyiv children’s hospital earlier this month. 

Ukraine’s long-range strikes have had an impact, NATO officials said, cutting Russian oil refining capacity by about 17 percent and forcing the Kremlin to impose domestic restrictions on gasoline exports. NATO nations are also looking to curb Russia’s so-called shadow fleet of 400 to 600 vessels that are helping the Kremlin get around sanctions by illegally transiting oil by sea. 

But even with the economic hemorrhaging, there’s little doubt that Russia will continue beyond Ukraine. “They’re crazy,” said Ukrainian Strategic Industries Minister Oleksandr Kamyshin. “They’ve been fighting with us for decades—for centuries. They’ve been fighting everyone around, from Afghanistan to Georgia. We have to be ready for that.”

The lesson learned from Russia’s two invasions of Ukraine—the initial attack on Crimea and the eastern Donbas region in 2014 as well as the full invasion eight years later—is that Putin could use the same pattern in an attack on NATO territory, said Pevkur, the Estonian defense minister: biting off a small piece of territory and then going for more. There is a fear that Putin might be able to destroy one part of NATO before the alliance’s political leaders have the ability to respond. 

“For us, there is no difference [if] they are coming to Tallinn or [if] they are coming to Berlin,” he said. “There is no difference if it’s just a localized partial attack or a full-scale attack.”

Other allies agree. “You can’t rule out anything when it comes to Russia,” said Billstrom, the Swedish foreign minister. “The only thing Russia understands is power and strength.”

The alliance’s military plans are still currently in peacetime mode, Pevkur said. The question is whether NATO nations will have the political willpower to make the tough decision to activate Article Five in a wartime scenario—and to resist Russia’s efforts to paralyze the North Atlantic Committee, the panel of military decision-makers who would make that call.

“I hope that everyone behind that table—32 members—are crystal clear that if there is a need, we have the votes,” Pevkur said. 

NATO is still filling in some of the gaps in its war plans to make apparent to Russia the costs of dipping its toe into a wider regional conflict. The alliance needs more munitions and air defense, weapons that are in short supply all over the world. It even needs to look toward putting down more of its own military bases in Europe, U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul told Foreign Policy in a recent interview. 

The West has to be ready to respond to Russian nuclear coercion. And it has to be ready for a challenge in any domain, or at any level. 

“The reality is we have to be ready for a hybrid challenge, a conventional challenge, possibly a nuclear challenge, or all three,” the second senior NATO official said. “That’s the way the Russians think: They see a continuum of war.”

NATO can dial up and dial down the response, but officials say that the allies have to be postured permanently to manage Russia’s activity and threats. “We have to get away from this idea that it’s either on or off,” the second senior NATO official added. 

That’s a stark contrast from where NATO allies have been for decades: letting war plans and troop contingents on the eastern flank atrophy.

“There was hope after [former Russian President Boris] Yeltsin came,” Pevkur said. “There was hope after the collapse of the Soviet Union.” 

What NATO countries hope—especially the front-line Baltic states—is that the allies have learned their lesson about Russia. 

“This is the consequence [of] what we did, hoping that Russia will be on a new political system,” Pevkur added. “They weren’t.”