In Foreign Policy, Jack Detsch and Robbie Gramer discuss the potential for Russia to start another war in Europe against a NATO country. They write:
Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep! This is the last of our special on-the-road editions at the Munich Security Conference (MSC). Thanks for coming along for the ride. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming this Thursday.
Here’s what’s on tap for the day: Europe prepares for the threat of a wider conflict with Russia, the U.S. Senate is optimistic on freeing stalled U.S. military aid to Ukraine, and yet another NATO ally hits the 2 percent defense spending mark.
Ready to Fight
Sunday, always the final day of the MSC, is traditionally when world leaders get a flair for the dramatic. On the last day of the conference in 2023, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas called on the European Union to jointly buy artillery ammunition for Ukraine. Later that day, the bloc’s foreign-policy chief, Josep Borrell, announced that the EU would make it happen.
But this time, as the 28 heads of government and state, 56 foreign ministers, 20 defense ministers, 36 spy chiefs, and hundreds of lawmakers from all over the world packed up and got ready to head home and the labyrinth of security checkpoints began to come down, it was a big announcement from Saturday that was still the talk of the town.
At a Ukrainian-themed lunch on Saturday afternoon, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen made a dramatic announcement: “We, Denmark, have decided to donate our entire artillery to Ukraine,” she said. “I am sorry, but the issue is not just about production. Europe still has military equipment. It has to be transferred to Ukraine.”
Frederiksen’s declaration—and its implicit challenge to other European countries to step up their own efforts to aid Ukraine—consumed the last day of the conference and left attendees grappling with some existential questions: Are they prepared not just to help Ukraine but also to defend Europe from a possible Russian attack on a NATO country? Are democracies capable of standing up against the threat of territory-grabbing dictatorships like Russian President Vladimir Putin’s?
Readying for war. Frederiksen’s announcement follows weeks of talk, including in Denmark, about preparing Europe for more conflict. Denmark’s defense minister has suggested that Russia could rebuild its capabilities to attack NATO soil within three to five years. Some officials whom SitRep spoke to in Munich thought Russia might even be ready more quickly.
“We do not have any illusions that Russia will change,” Hanno Pevkur, Estonia’s defense minister, told SitRep on Saturday. “[Putin’s] goal is to show that the West is not functioning, that NATO is not functioning, that Article 5 is not functioning. That is his goal.”
The hysteria about a potential conflict with Russia has been crisscrossing Europe for weeks. Swedish defense chief Gen. Micael Byden’s warning in early January that all Swedes should mentally prepare for war—even though Sweden has been issuing pamphlets to citizens for years warning of all-out sabotage by a foreign power—went viral on TikTok and left the telephone lines of Sweden’s child protection group besieged by frightened children and teenagers.
And a warning late last month from a top British military official, Gen. Patrick Sanders, that Russia is intent on “defeating our system and way of life” and his call for Britons to get ready for a level of mobilization not seen since World War II forced press flacks at No. 10 Downing St. to step in to clarify that they weren’t reinstating the draft.
NATO allies are preparing for the possibility of a Russian challenge in almost any respect, be it boots on the ground or a debilitating cyberattack. “What Russia aims to do is to be able to challenge us in every domain and at every level,” a NATO official told SitRep on Sunday. A lot depends on what happens in Ukraine, but Russia has dramatically increased its production of artillery shells, tanks, armored vehicles, and missiles, the official said.
Read more here.
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