Russia would be willing to attack a NATO country within two years, if the United States, after having mediated an agreement of ceased fire to end the war in Ukraine, decided to withdraw from the alliance. To affirm it in A report is the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS)based in London: Moscow could represent “a significant military challenge for NATO allies, in particular for the Baltic states, already in 2027”.
The relationship
The evaluation of the IISS is in line with the warnings of NATO leaders on the threat that Russia would represent for the alliance, also and above all when the war in Ukraine will end. In March the French president Emmanuel Macron He said that Russia’s rearmament showed Moscow’s intentions that go far beyond Ukraine, while the high representative for EU foreign policy, Kaja Kallas, last year, when he was still prime minister of Estonia, had said that “the question is when the next war will begin”.
The stall on the negotiations
Trump, who settling he had promised to be able to end the war in Ukraine in just 24 hours, is increasingly irritated by the reluctance of the Russia And he threatened to abandon the negotiations if they will not make progress quickly. Ukraine accepted a ceased fire 30 days during the talks with the United States, which took place last month. A move that has not been reciprocated by Russia. Surprisingly, however, Putin asked for the resumption of Istanbul negotiations, suspended starting from 2022
In their place, a Ukrainian delegation led by the Minister of Defense, Rustem Umerov, and a Russian, represented by Vladimir Medinsky and the deputy ministers of foreign and defense, Mikhail Galuzin and Alexander Fomin.
The next advance
In the meantime, NATO wonders if Putin is preparing for the next advance. The Minister of Defense Estonian, have Pevkur, in November he told Newsweek that, even if the fights had to cease and the Russian soldiers currently present in Eastern Ukraine were no longer necessary, “hundreds of thousands of soldiers would be available for Putin to approach the Baltic states”.
Although the Russian terrestrial forces underwent huge losses in Ukraine, at the end of 2022 the Kremlin said that a Russian army reform would be started. In September Putin said that active service would increase to 1.5 million. Citing an Estonian intelligence report of February 2024, Iiss stressed that NATO could face a “Soviet mass army in the next decade”, which would be “technologically lower” to NATO forces in different sectors, but with a “significant military potential”. Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, British Defense Chief of General Staff, also declared in 2024 that five years would be used at the Kremlin to bring the Russian army back to the strength he had before the war and five others to correct the weaknesses highlighted by the conflict. At the beginning of this year, Danish intelligence also estimated that Russia would serve about five years to be prepared for “a large -scale war on the European continent, in which the United States does not intervene.
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