2024-01-15 14:02:00
Bundeswehr outlines emergency situation: 300,000 NATO soldiers are supposed to fend off Putin
Jan 15, 2024, 3:02 p.m. Listen to article
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A training scenario for Bundeswehr soldiers outlines a Russian attack on NATO as early as the end of 2024. The Kremlin’s war preparations would be similar to those that were misinterpreted in January two years ago. The exercise portrays Russia as militarily strong and ready for war.
A secret Defense Ministry document outlines how Russia might initiate war with NATO – as early as this year. The “classified information” available to the “Bild” newspaper describes in detail a scenario that seems unimaginable to many Germans even at the moment. After all, Russia is – for now – using all of its military power to advance meter by meter in the Ukraine war. It was an arduous, costly undertaking once morest the tough Ukrainian defenders.
But the scenario from the Bendler bloc sees Putin ready for war to an even greater extent and willing to incorporate more Eastern European states. The first signs of this might soon become visible: In the secret document, entitled “Alliance Defense 2025,” Moscow will soon mobilize 200,000 men in another large wave and start a spring offensive once morest Ukraine with these additional forces. As Kiev continues to lack weapons and ammunition from the West, Russia’s campaign is making ever better progress.
With hybrid attacks once morest the Balts
For June 2024, the paper traces the first pinpricks in the direction of NATO: Russian attacks on the Baltics – not by invasion, but in the form of hybrid attacks, including in cyberspace. Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania are coming under increasing pressure, and Moscow is using the emerging chaos to turn the Russian minorities in all three Baltic states once morest the governments. There are violent protests on the streets there.
The open violence is used by Russia as an excuse to send 50,000 soldiers into maneuvers in Belarus, which borders the Baltic states, starting in late summer. Parallels to 2021 are no coincidence – the maneuver is actually just a cover to deploy war-ready Russian troops on the border with Poland and Lithuania.
In October, according to the scenario, the Kremlin might send troops and medium-range missiles to Kaliningrad. The Russian exclave lies between Lithuania and Poland, separated from Belarus by a narrow land corridor, the so-called “Suwalki Gap”. Vladimir Putin is trying to conquer this in a phase in which NATO appears significantly weakened, as the possible removal of US President Joe Biden will render the most important ally unable to act for several weeks.
A geopolitical chaos in which Russia would feel strong enough to attack the NATO states Lithuania and Poland – following the pattern of the invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014. A staged “border conflict” at the Suwalki Gap would lead to a violent conflict with many deaths. Anticipating a massive Russian attack, the governments of Poland and Lithuania sounded the alarm in the NATO Council in January 2025.
300,000 NATO soldiers ready to fight on “Day X”
But the Kremlin turns the tables with propaganda and disinformation, invents a threat from the West and uses it to justify further redeployment of troops to the Baltics and Belarus, where the scenario then assumes 70,000 Russian soldiers – two tank divisions and a mechanized infantry division. Finally, the secret paper outlines “Day A possible course of the war remains open in the exercise scenario. It ends with more than half a million Russian and NATO forces standing ready to fight at the Suwalki Gap.
It is not unusual to mentally escalate development in a training scenario and ultimately makes sense in order to be able to prepare yourself for massive challenges. Nevertheless, it is striking how short the secret paper measures the time that the West would have left to prepare for the fact that a victory over Ukraine would not satisfy Putin’s hunger for more power and control. In doing so, the Ministry of Defense is playing out exactly the scenario that many security experts are already describing as a concrete threat to the West. Among other things, because, in their view, NATO overestimates how much its current capabilities will deter Putin from attacking a member of the defense alliance.
The West’s aid to Ukraine, which is being attacked by Russia, has not yet reached the extent and strength that Kiev actually needs to drive out the invaders. After almost two years of war, the West appears increasingly weak, the USA is linking its aid to party-political intrigues and the European Union is not in a position to replace the lack of aid from Washington.
According to the Ministry of Defense, considering even extremely unlikely scenarios is “part of everyday military business.” The memory of January 2022, when Russia had already deployed troops on the border with Ukraine, leads to the conclusion that this imagined Bundeswehr exercise is anything but unrealistic.
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