Russian Window to Attack Europe: NATO Won’t Be Ready Until 2035

During the Cold War, under NATO’s MC 14/3, “Overall Strategic Concept for the Defense of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Area,” the Alliance adopted Flexible Response. Its logic was that NATO had to possess – and visibly demonstrate – the capability and political will to respond across the entire spectrum of aggression. By responding to any provocation – a combat aircraft approaching NATO airspace, a warship entering territorial waters, troops repositioning toward a border – the Alliance sought to deny Moscow the belief that it could exploit a local weakness, conduct a limited fait accompli, or probe the Alliance without consequences.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. The danger was that failure to respond could create a false perception of weakness, encouraging further escalation rather than preventing it. It was based on Cold War deterrence theory: “the manipulation of risk” and the need to prevent an adversary from believing aggression could remain limited or cost-free. Thomas Schelling described deterrence as fundamentally dependent on communicating both the ability and the willingness to act. Herman Kahn similarly stressed escalation dominance: the ability to respond at successive levels so the adversary could not find a safe rung on the escalation ladder. The objective was a calibrated response – sufficient to preserve deterrence, restrained enough to retain escalation control. Other Topics of Interest Romania Expels Russian Diplomat After Repeated Drone Incursions Bucharest showed Russia’s ambassador drone fragments as the latest airspace breach on Sunday marks the third such reported in three days. The Alliance stopped responding to Russian provocations after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Following that collapse in 1991, NATO member nations systematically gutted their military forces to capture what was celebrated as the “peace dividend.” Concurrently, after suffering deep decay and economic ruin throughout the 1990s, Russia officially launched a massive, multi-decade rebuilding program for its armed forces starting in 2008. The result: the Second Chechen War. The Russo-Georgian War (2008). Military intervention in Syria (2015–2024). The Russo-Ukrainian War (ongoing). The Russo-European hybrid war (ongoing). Since 2014 – not only in Ukraine but across the European continent – NATO’s response to Russian provocations and acts of aggression, or rather the absence of one, has given the Kremlin every reason to suspect weakness. While all eyes focus on the Russo-Ukrainian War, NATO has largely ignored most Russian transgressions of international law on its territory. Those acts of aggression include sabotage operations against critical infrastructure, cyberattacks on government systems, disinformation campaigns designed to fracture political consensus, election interference across multiple countries, GPS jamming affecting civilian aviation, repeated airspace violations, and increasingly brazen acts of violence against Western targets. About 75 to 80 Russian strike drones and missiles have violated European airspace since 2022. Russian drones or drone debris have crashed onto Moldovan territory more than 20 times and onto Romanian territory at least 30 times since February 2022. On the night of 9–10 September 2025, around 24 Russian military drones intentionally crossed into Polish airspace. Russia has also operated surveillance drones over critical infrastructure – military bases, airports, nuclear power plants – across the continent. A July 2026 IISS-linked investigation reportedly identified 144 significant drone incidents across 13 European countries between August 2024 and February 2026 and assessed it as “highly likely” that the Kremlin had conducted a coordinated UAV campaign. Both the missile and drone incursions into NATO airspace and the surveillance campaign across Europe demonstrate that the Kremlin sees the risks as small because of NATO’s restraint. All this results from the Kremlin’s belief that it can continue to escalate without repercussions. NATO military leaders warn of war with Russia in next three years Having acted in violation of strategies designed to prevent strategic miscalculations, having ignored Russia’s formal warnings that it intends to expand its sphere of influence over parts of NATO territory, and having failed to respond resolutely to an ever-escalating hybrid war, NATO and European non-response has greatly increased the risk of war beyond Ukraine. This is why NATO’s generals warn of war by 2029. Crucially, Russia is presented with a unique window of opportunity: Europe will be unable to defend itself before 2035. Europe won’t be ready to lead its own conventional defense until then, SACEUR Gen. Alexus Grynkewich told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March. NATO member countries – who have agreed to elevate their defense budgets to 5% of GDP – “should set them on a path to play the dominant role in the defense of Europe,” Grynkewich said. “They won’t be all the way there, but certainly by 2035.” Russia also brings unique capabilities and battlefield experience that currently widens European vulnerabilities: a larger army than before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a new Unmanned System Forces branch, complex long-range missile and drone strike capabilities, guided glide bombs with expanding range, and a scaled-up FPV drone capability – set against NATO’s critical shortage of air defense systems and drone countermeasures. As NATO leaders have acknowledged, parts of Europe’s ground-based air defense must effectively be rebuilt nearly from scratch after decades of neglect. Procuring complex radar units, command-and-control software, and mobile launcher platforms requires specialized raw materials and microchips with multi-year lead times. In October 2024, NATO’s “minimum capability requirements” suggested increasing ground-based air defense systems from 293 to 1,467. NATO manufacturers collectively produce an estimated 15 to 25 complete IRIS-T, Patriot, SAMP/T, and NASAMS systems per year, planning to scale up to 34-36 by 2028. Closing the gap of 1,174 systems must realistically be expected to take 10 to 15 years – extending well into the late 2030s. Seven to twelve years after the potential start of an open confrontation with Russia. NATO’s shortage of air defense systems and interceptors is demonstrated daily in its failure to supply Ukraine with the means to stop Russian ballistic missiles. Recent military exercises exposed further vulnerabilities. The Hedgehog-2025 drills in Estonia, the REPMUS and Dynamic Messenger maritime exercises in Portugal, and Exercise Aurora 26 in Sweden all showed that NATO forces suffered “cognitive overload” and tactical failures because commanders did not account for how ubiquitous drones make the modern battlefield completely transparent. Spurred by repeated airspace incursions on its eastern flank and lessons from Ukraine, NATO launched the Drone Edge Initiative – $40 billion in counter-drone investment over five years – to fundamentally overhaul its capabilities. While NATO is undergoing a rapid transformation, the capability gap will not be closed before 2031, when the initiative’s five-year investment horizon ends. Two years after a potential confrontation with Russia could begin. NATO’s deterrence isn’t decided in Washington or Brussels; it’s decided in the Kremlin. If Russia were deterred, it would act accordingly – it doesn’t Moscow aims to trigger the collapse of the Alliance by challenging Article 5 and the principle of collective defense through a limited conflict with one or more NATO members. Having met present-day challenges in a divided Alliance, the Kremlin does not believe in the NATO credo that an armed attack against one member shall be considered an attack against them all. Russia has grown increasingly brazen because of the Alliance’s lack of response, member states’ failure to rearm in time, the lack of European unity, and the US’s flirtation with Russia and its disdain for NATO. The United States has formally warned Poland that Russia is actively planning an armed provocation on Polish soil designed to test NATO’s commitment to collective self-defense. US and Polish security officials believe Russia’s goal is not a full-scale invasion but a calculated political gamble. By staging an operation that sits right on the edge of invoking Article 5, Moscow aims to fracture alliance unity and pressure Western allies into halting military and financial aid to Ukraine. Bruno Kahl, former head of the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), warned in 2024 that Russia was “preparing for war with the West” and that military conflict was becoming a “possible option.” He assessed it would be limited – an invasion of Norway’s Spitsbergen Island or operations in the Baltics – rather than a large-scale attack on European NATO countries. The Kremlin wages an escalating hybrid war against NATO member states, just as it did in Ukraine between 2014 and 2022. Russia’s pattern of escalation mirrors its pre-2022 posture in Ukraine, suggesting it may be preparing for a similar escalation against NATO territory. This leaves five countries most exposed: Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Norway – with Finland increasingly at risk given explicit Kremlin threats. Putin’s decision to escalate might very well be a strategic miscalculation. But it will be on us for failing to respond to Russia’s provocations and ever-escalating aggressions. Timelines don’t match The only solution that will help close some of the existing capability gaps is to immediately integrate Ukraine into a European defense alliance. The governments of France, Germany, the UK, Poland, and the Nordic states hold the key – not NATO as an institution. A new alliance cannot be built in months – but it can be declared. And declaration alone shifts the calculus. What matters in the immediate term is credible political commitment, not completed institutional architecture. A coalition of like-minded countries would build on existing NATO interoperability, significantly reducing the time needed to establish it. The force structure already exists: Ukraine’s battle-hardened army, National Guard, Special Operations Forces, air defense, and Unmanned System Forces, combined with European 5th-generation combat aircraft and state-of-the-art navies – credible, combat-proven, and in place. NATO is, unfortunately, part of Europe’s security problem. I have substantiated the claim in a series of articles, explaining why its fundamental challenges go far beyond its present capability problems. Europe now faces two strategic adversaries: Russia and a NATO member. While the Alliance is increasingly addressing those capability problems, its fundamental structural weaknesses – an ineffective decision-making process, disagreement over levels of ambition and strategy, and transatlantic fractures – cannot be resolved from within. The existing deterrence problem – the fact that Russia is no longer deterred by the Alliance – can only be solved by creating something that does. The alliance Russia fears isn’t NATO. It’s a coalition that will actually fight. The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.