Russia is too weak militarily to invade any Nato country. It is building some military infrastructure, notably on the border with Finland, but it has no soldiers to put there. Whatever Russia is planning is in a different domain, a war of nerves, aimed at our brains, not our territory.
Edward Lucas
On 31 August, 1939, Nazi SS officers disguised as Poles attacked the radio station in the then German town of Gleiwitz. They broadcast a brief message, leaving dead bodies and an excuse for Adolf Hitler to attack Poland.
US intelligence sources, echoed by politicians, think that the Kremlin is planning a similar false-flag provocation. The stunt would involve Ukrainian drones (bought or hijacked) under Russian direction.
They might hit targets in Poland, further alienating public and official opinion: the Polish security service is already worried about its Ukrainian counterparts’ robust habits.
Another more alarming variant involves these Ukrainian drones, supposedly launched from Poland or the Baltics, hitting targets (probably civilian) in Kaliningrad.
Russia would blame its neighbours for facilitating these attacks, and demand countermeasures: investigations, prosecutions, compensation etc.
At best that would be diplomatic blackmail. At worst it would be a pretext for a Russian counterstrike on Nato territory.
Such an attack would probably be symbolic, with nobody hurt or killed. But then what? Doing nothing sets a terrible precedent. If the country targeted by the Russians hits back against Russian territory, would other Nato countries back it, or call for “dialogue”? Such worries are already corrosive.
The most important point to bear in mind here is that any such false-flag operation cannot be a pretext for a real war.
Russia is too weak militarily to invade any Nato country. It is building some military infrastructure, notably on the border with Finland, but it has no soldiers to put there.
Even if it started scraping together forces from the Ukraine front to deploy in Kaliningrad, Pskov or anywhere else on its western border, neighbouring countries would notice at once. They and their allies will react, reinforcing, mobilising and mustering deterrent power.
Whatever Russia is planning is in a different domain, a war of nerves, aimed at our brains, not our territory.
Baltic and Polish ‘hotheads’
One aim is to depict the frontline states as hotheads, who will drag the rest of the alliance into escalation and disaster. Another, complementary, goal is to make the frontline states doubt their allies’ resolve: they must believe that the ‘old West’ secretly despises them and will not fight for them.
The Kremlin arch-crony Nikolai Patrushev pushes these lines in a sulphurous recent interview for Rossiskaya Gazeta, accusing Lithuanian politicians of wanting to drag all Europe into the “reckless gamble” of an attack on Kaliningrad (this plan, of course, exists only in Russian imagination).
He also claimed that [west] Europeans, led by Britain, honed their racist hatreds on what they regarded as the “sub-human” peoples of the Baltic, adding with a flourish that an alumnus of Eton (Britain’s most exclusive private school) “would never view an Estonian or a Latvian as an equal”.
The response to this cognitive barrage should be confident, disciplined, speedy and sophisticated.
