Europe’s gravest security crisis in decades is heading to disaster. Russia’s intrusions into Polish, Romanian and Estonian airspace cannot be dismissed as accidents or trivialities. They are a direct attack, not on NATO’s territory but on the alliance’s credibility.
Russia does not need to defeat NATO militarily if it can defeat it politically. If alliance members do not believe that other members will come to their aid when they are attacked, they feel isolated. They increasingly make plans to fight solo. And they think less about how to help others. Toe-to-toe with individual NATO countries, or with small groups of them, Russia looks much more powerful.
The backslapping in NATO is infuriating. Nothing it does is deterring Russia. The alliance deployed its most expensive warplanes and missiles to shoot down cheap Russian drones over Poland. It allowed a Russian drone to enter Romania and fly back into Ukraine. Then it scrambled fighter jets in response to a 12-minute intrusion into Estonia’s airspace. A NATO spokesperson called this “yet another example of reckless Russian behaviour and NATO’s ability to respond”.
The first part of that sentence grossly underplays the threat. This is not Russian “reckless behaviour”. That is the language used to condemn drunk drivers and teenage hooligans. The Kremlin is systematically, brazenly taunting the alliance. The second part of the sentence should more accurately read: “NATO’s inability to respond.” On the political level, the silence from the White House is deafening. Under any previous administration, the US would be spearheading NATO’s reaction to a provocation of this seriousness. Now, the US is not just missing in action. It is actively undermining its allies’ defences. A heavily-sourced report in The Atlantic reveals that the US is now blocking sales of sensitive military equipment to Europe.
NATO’s military response is missing, too. Where is the clear instruction to shoot down Russian planes and drones that breach NATO’s airspace? It looks as though the US—which sits at the heart of the NATO military command structure—has decided to avoid any military confrontation with Russia. That gives a green light to Vladimir Putin to continue humiliating and dividing the alliance.
European allies still have options. They can agree on their own rules of engagement, independently of NATO. But they should be careful about falling into traps set by the Kremlin. Putin may be seeking to highlight the military weaknesses of countries like Estonia, which has no air force, or the territorial vulnerability of the Suwałki-Alytus corridor, which links Poland and Lithuania. It serves the Kremlin to plant the corrosive question in allies’ minds: “Are you willing to go to war with Russia on behalf of the Baltic states?” Russian threats to these countries should not result in their being singled out as special cases. The Kremlin is threatening all of Europe. In other words, just because Putin is carrying out stunts in the Baltic does not mean that the alliance must necessarily focus its response there.
Indeed, a better reaction would be to take a different initiative. Accelerating the seizure of Russia’s frozen central bank assets held in European bank accounts to fund Ukraine’s war effort, as proposed by the European Union and now the United Kingdom. would apply a $200 bn penalty: around $16 billion for each one of the 12 minutes that the Russian jets spent in Estonian airspace. The “Eastern Sentry” air defence shield now being deployed along NATO’s eastern frontier would deter Russia even more if it were deployed in western Ukraine as part of the proposed “Sky Shield”.
Escalation is unavoidable now. Let it be on our terms, not Putin’s.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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