Nato’s top commander issued a stark warning this week, saying that his troops will destroy “anything and everything” involved if a country was “foolish enough” to launch an attack on its territory.

“If someone is foolish enough to attack us, we will fight,” US Air Force General Alexus Grynkewich told the Warsaw Security Forum on Monday. “We will stop the attack and deny them the ability to achieve their objectives, whatever those might be.”

Grynkewich’s blunt remarks came at a time of escalating tensions between ⁠Europe and Russia, with concerns that Moscow is preparing to expand its aggression beyond Ukraine, even by staging a limited military incursion to test Nato’s resolve.

On the front lines, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have for years warned of Moscow’s ambitions. But as the Kremlin escalates its aggression, and with Nato failing to deter it, the Baltics are increasingly worried Europe could be stumbling into a trap.

Russia’s brutal legacy in the Baltics

Artis Pabriks, a former defence minister and deputy prime minister of Latvia, told The i Paper that Russia has for years been using “strategic communications or cognitive warfare” within Nato to “depict the Baltic countries as something to which Russia might have more rights than it usually could have”.

Like much of Eastern Europe, the Baltic states endured decades of brutal Soviet occupation, until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, an event Vladimir Putin has described as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”. The Russian president has made reasserting Moscow’s dominance over former Soviet republics a core objective for his rule.

And Putin’s aims go beyond the control of foreign affairs and into direct influence over aspects of the internal policies of post-Soviet states, according to the Institute for the Study of War in Washington DC, which said that the Kremlin sees these countries as rightful parts of its sphere of influence.

“The Kremlin is working to split Nato,” said Edward Lucas, founder of the Baltic International Security Centre. “Specifically separating the Baltics and others including Poland from the rest of Europe, to deprive them of the protections of Nato and EU membership.”

The Baltics’ location bordering Russia means that they are more exposed than most Nato countries, and Nato’s reluctance so far to strongly confront Russia appears to be increasing the likelihood of greater aggression from Moscow.

“What worries many of us in the Baltic region is that we are sleepwalking into such a trap,” warned Pabriks.

The Baltic states are small: Estonia has a population of just 1.33 million, Latvia 1.9 million and Lithuania 2.79 million. Lithuania is also located between Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad and its ally Belarus, with the Suwałki Gap to the south. This strategic 40-mile corridor links Kaliningrad to the rest of Russia via Belarus. In the event of a conflict, closure of the gap would cut off the three countries from land reinforcements.

Moscow preparing ‘something symbolic’

While an outright invasion has largely been dismissed, with Russia still tied down in Ukraine, Putin could still see the benefit of targeting the region as a way to undermine Nato.

The Baltics have “long been a focus of Russian military planning, information operations, cyber activities and other forms of hybrid pressure”, said Melita Phachulia of the Stockholm Centre for Research and Innovation Security.

And Moscow has plenty of options, she added. “A more likely scenario would be Russia testing Nato’s cohesion through limited or ambiguous actions that remain below the threshold of conventional war,” Phachulia said, adding that this might include more actions like the sabotage of undersea cables, GPS jamming, drone incursions or the “weaponisation” of migration.

Lithuania’s President, Gitanas Nausėda, said in July that Russia was planning potential attacks on critical infrastructure in the Baltics or Poland, while Latvian intelligence has said that Putin was considering more hybrid attacks designed to “send a signal: stop supporting Ukraine, or you will have your own problems”.

According to Lucas, “Russia could do something symbolic, and that’s what we’re seeing at the moment: Russian testing, attacking our decision-making. And that is our weak point… That’s a problem in Brussels, chiefly Berlin, London, Paris, and of course Washington DC”.

Could Russia weaponise an ‘internal threat’?

There are fears, however, that Nato’s reluctance to confront such incidents could encourage Putin to try a small-scale incursion. Reports suggested that CIA director John Ratcliffe flew to Moscow in August to try to warn Russia against further escalations, especially in the Baltics.

“It’s not necessarily that Putin plans to occupy Estonia or Latvia or Lithuania,” said Pabriks. “But for him, it’s important to have a case where he can show that Nato doesn’t react properly and it’s an empty shell. He could do something against some Nato member country which is close to their border, say to take 5 sq km….We give up our freedoms by centimetres and metres and kilometres. And one day we wake up and we are under their boot.”

In 2021, leaked documents from the Russian presidential administration revealed it was planning to maintain influence in the Baltics by funding pro-Russian groups.

Estonia and Latvia have the largest number of ethnic Russians in the EU as a proportion of their populations, and Moscow has tried to weaponise Russian speakers in the Baltics as part of efforts to complicate relations with their Western partners. Russia has also used this playbook elsewhere, including in Ukraine.

In the Baltics, anonymous Telegram channels and low-level agitation has worked to spread discontent over issues including campaigns to remove Soviet-era monuments and Latvia’s move to reduce Russian-language instructions in schools. However, there is little sign of serious discontent.

“Since 1991, Russia has never in any seriousness tried to foment separatism in the Baltic,” said Donatas Kupčiūnas, Baltic fellow at Cambridge University’s Centre for Geopolitics, with Moscow’s policies to minorities abroad “subsumed under broader strategic considerations”. He added that even Latvia’s recent language measures prompted “only lukewarm protests from Russia, because it has bigger problems to deal with”.

Meanwhile in Estonia, attachment to the Russian language has gone hand in hand with increased loyalty to Estonia, according to Institut Montaigne, a Paris-based think-tank. “There’s no sort of ‘minority’ in the Baltic hankering to be liberated from local rule and put under under rule of Moscow,” said Lucas.

‘We will respond with all the force we can find’

“Vulnerability should not be confused with weakness,” said Phachulia.

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have invested heavily in defence and resilience, taking a whole-of-society approach with conscription and massive reserve military forces. All are outsized defence spenders, at around 5 per cent of GDP, while a Baltic Defence Line of fortifications, bunkers and anti-tank obstacles now winds along their borders with Russia and Belarus.

The presence of “trip-wire” troops from across Nato – a UK-led battlegroup in Estonia, and another each in Latvia and Lithuania – as well as air policing and reinforced regional defence plans, further seek to underscore that “any attack on the Baltics is not an attack on the Baltics – it’s an attack on Nato”, said Lucas.

Right now, Russia knows it cannot win a war against Nato. However, by escalating sub-threshold attacks in places like the Baltics, it is hoping that it may not need to.

The Baltics have warned Nato allies that if it cannot establish deterrence or punish Russia for hostile actions, Putin will grow bolder. “Russia is not our problem,” Pabriks said, ironically. “Our problem is our allies, which for decades have not been listening to what we have been telling them. Russia is escalating, and it is escalating because the West did not choose to respond.”

“Pull yourselves together and start to act,” he said of Nato, “because we all are in danger with this”.