Russia could attack Nato in as little as 5 years

As Baltic nations batten down the hatches, German defence minister issues troubling prediction

VLADIMIR PUTIN could attack Nato in as little as five years, Germany has warned, as Baltic nations approved a plan to build new defences along their borders with both Russia and Belarus. “We have to take into account that Vladimir Putin will one day even attack a Nato country,” said Boris Pistorius, the German defence minister. “Our experts expect a period of five to eight years in which this could be possible,” he told newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, a German newspaper. “At the moment I don’t think a Russian attack is likely. Europe is dealing with a “military threat situation… that has not existed for 30 years,” he added. “We hear threats from the Kremlin almost every day – most recently against our friends in the Baltics.”

The Baltic nations are now taking steps to increase border security given those increased security concerns after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Yesterday Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania signed an agreement to build bunkers over the next few years to bolster their borders with Russia and Belarus, a staunch ally of Moscow.

Under the agreement, signed in Riga, the three countries will “construct anti-mobility defensive installations in the coming years to deter and, if necessary, defend against military threats,” the Estonian defence ministry said.

The plan, and Mr Pistorius’s comments, came the day after a top Nato military official warned that civilians in the West must prepare for the possibility of all-out war with Russia in the next 20 years, and be ready to mobilise.

While various militaries are primed for the outbreak of war, the general public must also be ready for a conflict that would mean a wholesale change in their lives, said Adml Bauer, a Dutch naval officer who chairs the Nato military committee.

“We have to realise it’s not a given that we are in peace,” he said. “And that’s why we [Nato] are preparing for a conflict with Russia. But the discussion is much wider. It is also the industrial base and also the people that have to understand they play a role.”

Finland became Nato’s latest member when it joined last April. Petteri Orpo, the country’s prime minister, said: “I don’t see any immediate military threat from Russia against Finland. We sleep peacefully... we are well prepared.”

With Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine approaching its two-year anniversary, global stockpiles of weapons and ammunition have been whittled down significantly. Adml Bauer warned that more preparation is needed now to ensure there aren’t shortages of materiel in the future.

“You need to be able to fall back on an industrial base that is able to produce weapons and ammunition fast enough to be able to continue a conflict if you are in it,” he said.

The EU has been unable to deliver on plans to send one million 155mm shells to Kyiv by Februrary, impacting the ability for Ukraine to return fire.

The first thing George Robertson asks of visitors to his office is to look at a painting showing a cross section of topsoil. At the top, red poppies flutter against a blue sky. In the earth below lies a layer of human bones.

“Pretty gory, I know. But it was in storage for years and when I moved into this office I thought no, it deserves putting up.”

“The Serb paramilitaries had rounded up 20 odd kids and their families, put them in a house and then threw grenades in, burnt the house down. I went back [to Kosovo] 20 years later and they presented me with that.”

A reminder, perhaps, of just how bad Kosovo could have become if Robertson, then Tony Blair’s defence secretary, had not teamed up with other European ministers to push for a controversial Nato intervention.

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen has seen his fair share of international crises. As Tony Blair’s secretary of state for defence and later secretary general of Nato between 1999 and 2003 he presided over Nato’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999, the alliance’s enlargement to include former Warsaw Pact members in Eastern Europe, and its only ever invocation of Article Five, the North Atlantic Treaty’s self defence clause, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

Unlike many retired politicians and generals, he is still viewed by serving defence officials and thinkers as a credible elder statesman. Now, he has a warning: We are living through a period of global volatility “unlike anything in history, and we are not rising to the occasion”.

“If they [Ukraine] lose, we lose... because otherwise the world order will be written by the Chinese and the Russians and the Iranians and the North Koreans. And that will make a very, very uncomfortable world for my grandkids.” It is not a reassuring prediction. The war in Ukraine is about to enter its third year, the Middle East is aflame, and Western nerves jangle over Xi Jinping’s plans for Chinese “unification” with Taiwan.

And by the end of the year Donald Trump, who is on record telling European officials that “Nato is dead,” may once again be president-elect of the United States.

Some officials are openly warning that Britain may be involved in a peer-to-peer conflict within a decade. Some people say the world has never been so dangerous as it is in 2024. Can he reassure us it isn’t?

“Oh, it’s bad,” he said. “People say it’s an incredibly dangerous time. Well, it is. We have never had such a volatility of events, so many things simultaneously happening in politics of both democracies and autocracies. Is it the most dangerous period? No.”

Lord Robertson left Nato in 2003, but never really retired. At the age of 77 he is a frantically busy peer, commuting weekly between Westminster and his home in Dunblane where he lives with his wife Sandra (he also has three grown-up children).

His one concession to the quiet life is amateur photography – he has published a book, of his photographs. But most of his time is taken up lecturing, reviewing books, and above all the House of Lord’s day job of scrutinising legislation passed in the Commons.

He’s currently exercised by the wording of the Government’s Rwanda bill, which effectively declares Rwanda a safe country – despite Britain itself accepting asylum seekers fleeing persecution there. “Have you read it?” he asks with a mix of incredulity and amusement. “It’s like saying there’s a dog, but we’ve got a law here that says it’s a cat, so it is a cat.”

But it is his status as an elder statesman of international security that his advice is mostly sought. It is Lord Robertson’s hypothesis that the current era is about much more than the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

It is, he argues, about a seemingly infinite succession of surprises. There is a rapid velocity of technological, scientific and environmental change. That in turn is creating new vulnerabilities, from pandemics to cyber war. On top of that is a crisis of values in the West and a startling vacuum of leadership.

“It’s unlike anything in history this period we’re living through,” he says.

“It is almost a battle of alliances. The global south is taking sides and they don’t seem to recognise that they’ve got a dog in the fight – that if you can change borders by the use of force that anarchy is the eventual outcome.”

“The Western alliance is there, but maybe endangered by Donald Trump coming in. We cannot afford to be taken by surprise again.”

It is the last of his “six Vs” – the vacuum of leadership – that bothers him most. Yes, he concedes, the Westerners, including his own generation of leaders, became complacent in the aftermath of the Cold War. “Even now, when there is a land war in Europe, when we’ve got Ukraine and some other problems, when we basically know – the Prime Minister was reminding us on Monday of how important it was that [Ukraine] gets the equipment. And he still doesn’t say when we will give them a multi-year commitment.”

Rishi Sunak this week won a standing ovation in Ukraine’s parliament, when he announced a new package of aid. It was a strong speech, and greeted with relief by Ukrainians who sense a creeping fatigue over the war. But Robertson fears there is still too large a gap between the bravado of Western rhetoric and the hesitancy of their actions for the Kremlin to take them seriously.

“There is a basic principle in politics: it is not what you say, it is what people hear. We forget that all the time.”

“The only thing that will change Vladimir Putin’s mind – and that’s the mind that dictates what is happening there – is you’ve got to say you are there for the duration.”

“One speech on a Monday afternoon is not enough,” he said.

“The money we pay for Ukraine at the moment runs out in a few weeks time in March. The Prime Minister goes out there and makes all the right noises and gets an award and announces two-and-a-half billion pounds for the next year. What they need is for us to say: ‘We’re going to give you two and a half billion pounds every year.’ Because that’s the only thing that will be heard in the Kremlin.”

He sees a similar problem across the Atlantic. Joe Biden has also shown “timidity” in his response to Ukraine. And Trump has even worse messaging problems. “I was talking to an American congressional delegation this week, who were pointing out that although he was rhetorical about Nato before, he actually increased the American contribution to Nato. The American Congress has now put in place a law that says he cannot withdraw from Nato,” he explains.

“They were saying, ‘look what Donald Trump did. We are absolutely on the side of the Ukrainians. We just want this deal done.”

“I said, ‘but that’s not what is appearing in the Kremlin. And that is all they are listening to.”

One of three children, George Robertson was born in 1946 on the Hebridean island of Islay, the son of a policeman and a teacher. The family later moved to Dunoon, a small town on the Clyde, where the “very shy and retiring” boy joined the school debating society and discovered that he was actually very opinionated.

Political awakening came in his teens, when an American nuclear submarine base opened in Holy Loch, the bay next door to the town.

“The world came to Dunoon to protest. It was like a political playground, and I got engaged and involved. So I was on my bike finding campsites for the demonstrators, and my father was arresting them. I was a bit of an embarrassment to my father.”

He continued his radical activities at university in Dundee, where he studied economics, joined the Labour Party, and was elected to parliament after winning the Hamilton by-election in 1978. By the 1990s he was already on the pro-European centre-right of the party. His willingness to work across party lines to get the Maastricht Treaty ratified saw him recognised as parliamentarian of the year in 1993.

After the 1997 Labour landslide, Tony Blair appointed him secretary of state for defence. He was soon embroiled in the most dramatic series of crises since the end of the Cold War.

Appalled at Slobodan Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, he was a strong backer of Nato military intervention in 1999.

Later that year he left government to become secretary general of Nato, where he helped defuse an insurgency in the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia that was on the brink of exploding into yet another Balkan war. After the September 11 attacks, he pushed through Nato’s first enactment of its Article 5, the North Atlantic Treaty’s hallowed mutual defence clause, in response.

At the time, it made sense. An ally had suffered a horrific attack, the West was at the peak of its powers, and humanitarian military interventions, from Bosnia to Kosovo to Sierra Leone, seemed to have worked. Many defence thinkers now look on it as a tragic mistake: the two-decade embroilment in Afghanistan took Nato out of its intended area of responsibility, and saw its members invest heavily in counterinsurgency capabilities that left them cruelly ill prepared when a conventional threat reappeared in Europe. It also ended in the unmitigated disaster of the 2021 withdrawal – a public humiliation that probably encouraged Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

It would be unfair to accuse him of failing to foresee a land war in Europe 20 years down the line. But are the consequences of those decisions something he reflects on?

“I do. A lot,” he admits.

And was his generation of policy makers guilty of a certain complacency, especially about Russia?

“We are.” But he adds: “The element of surprise, it’s not new. If you list all of the things that have happened, you know: the Berlin Wall coming down; the transition in South Africa; the Fukushima disaster. The most recent ones are, the October 7 attack on Israel and the invasion of Ukraine.”

“And therefore, that’s part of that volatility, really. The thought that Donald Trump will be elected president of the United States. Who would have thought that Boris Johnson was going to be the prime minister of the United Kingdom?”

It was in this period he worked closely with Vladimir Putin, then new in the Kremlin and positioning himself as a pro-Western democrat. The pair met nine times over Robertson’s period as secretary general, and he says the Russian president was generally co-operative.

“There was a glint of determination about rescuing Russia’s reputation, you know, which had been trashed by Yeltsin. So this guy comes in, he’s an ex-KGB guy, and he said, the first meeting: ‘I want Russia to be part of Western Europe. That’s our destiny.’”

At the second meeting, Putin famously asked Robertson when Russia would be invited to join Nato. By 2002, he stood beside Robertson at a press conference and declared Ukraine an independent sovereign state that would make its own decisions about security.

Robertson rejects the suggestion he was duped. “I don’t think he was lying,” he said. “He changed. Something inside him was feeding this idea of recreating the respect, the admiration, of the Soviet Union. He’s got a very thin skin.”

Yet the betrayal of the invasion clearly hurts. Lord Robertson keeps a copy of the 2002 Nato-Russia declaration Putin signed. He rejects the grievances Putin has since trotted out about Kosovo and Nato enlargement. He never once complained at the time, says Robertson. Those are little more than excuses, he says – “we want to be angry. Let’s find grounds for being angry. You take a position and then you accumulate the evidence that sort of backs it up, like the Post Office. And I think the Russians do that as well.”

That is why he believes the argument that the time has come for the conflict to be somehow frozen, and a ceasefire established that leaves the current lines in place without a clear Ukrainian victory and Russian defeat, is “dangerous talk”.

“I think the next stage for Putin, if he succeeds here, is that you build up another buffer. He will mop up Moldova, Armenia, Kazakhstan – building that buffer in there. “

“There is a timidity both in the White House and in Downing Street and in other capitals in Europe, that they don’t want to escalate. You can’t give them long range weapons because they might use them into territorial Russia and then we will have World War

Three. So that fear of escalation is reducing that objective, that Ukraine has got to win.”

“In my view, again psychologically, we have got to inculcate into the Russian high command the thought that they could escalate and bring about that conflict. Because a conflict with Nato would lead to Russian defeat.

“About four years after I left Nato the military chiefs club of the Russian Federation invited me back to come and address them. These old soldiers are profoundly patriotic. The motherland is everything. They are also deeply, deeply conservative. If they felt the motherland were actually in danger, instead of pretending as they do now – then that psychological switch is the signal that is required.

“I think we have to get the message into their minds that they cannot win, that we will not let them win, and they may change their minds.”

That could be a risky strategy. Admiral Rob Bauer, Nato’s current military chief, warned this week that Nato must prepare for all-out war with Russia in the next 20 years. The head of Poland’s national security agency last month gave the alliance’s eastern members just three years to arm themselves.

Defence think tankers are rehearsing a nightmare scenario of Russia launching a surprise attack on the Baltic States, presenting Nato with a

before the alliance can agree on an effective military response.

By exploiting fear of nuclear war, Putin could then seek to persuade European governments to talk rather than fight – avoiding a conventional war (which he would lose), while effectively destroying Nato politically by demonstrating that Article 5 is useless.

Robertson is sceptical. “I don’t think he will cross the Article 5 line.”

“The key thing about nuclear deterrence is: You don’t know what we’re going to do. And you can say Trump won’t press the button. But actually you’ve got the French and the British deterrents. And the British deterrent is independent.”

He freely admits he has come a long way from scouting for CND protesters at Holy Loch. And yet the painting on his office wall is a reminder that there is more continuity than contradiction between the angry young pacifist scouting CND campsites and the peer of the realm putting faith in mutually assured destruction. It was, after all, a group of former student radicals who resolved to stop Slobodan Milosevic’s nascent genocide in Kosovo.

“The French, German, and British foreign and defence ministers around that table were all of that 1960s generation who protested against the Vietnam war,” he recalled. “We knew what the public didn’t know, about Operation Horseshoe and Milosovic expelling an entire population. Are you going to take military action? You have to, when you’re faced with that enormous responsibility.

“We need to look at Ukraine in the same context. Because if they lose – if Putin wins – then we all lose.”

‘It’s bad. We have never had such volatility of events, so many things happening at once’

‘We have got to get it into their minds that they cannot win, we will not let them win’