For months, European allies have cautiously warned about the prospect of war with Russia, urging the continent to take the threat seriously and rearm itself for the possibility. The warning was always hedged: a Russia-NATO war was still unlikely. In the past week, something appears to have changed, and so has the urgency.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told parliament that Russia intends to send drones or missiles into NATO territory and then call the strikes accidental. The Czech Republic’s intelligence chief put the timeline for such a test at months, not years. CIA Director John Ratcliffe flew to Moscow in August to warn against precisely this.
There is a growing sense of imminence in Western capitals; that Russia has chosen to escalate with NATO over Ukraine in a way that could provoke conflict. All of it rests on one assumption: that Russian President Vladimir Putin has the ability to escalate into a direct confrontation with NATO. He has the option to provoke, certainly, and the Russian threat to NATO should not be underestimated.
Putin can be an agent of disruption and chaos, as he is currently with Russia’s hybrid warfare against NATO allies. But there is good reason for cool-headedness about what Russia is capable of doing to NATO. Five hard truths for Putin suggest he does not have the option to fight the West in a major open war, even if he wanted to.
Russia has already spent much of the force a NATO war would require in the killing fields of eastern Ukraine. The security think tank CSIS estimates 1.4 million Russian battlefield casualties and as many as 450,000 dead between February 2022 and June 2026. For perspective, that is more than four times all U.S. fatalities in every war since World War II combined.
In 2026, monthly casualties of 30,000 to 34,000 outrun recruitment of roughly 27,000. The IISS, another think tank, which puts Russian deaths above 300,000 by early this year, has tracked a recruitment slide since late 2025, though not enough to end Russia’s campaign. What all that death and injury bought Russia on the battlefield is negligible.
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