Is Putin gearing up his war machine to attack Europe once he’s defeated Ukraine? Or is Russia, in fact, as Donald Trump wrote this week, “a paper tiger”? In his strongest-worded condemnation of Putin yet, Trump this week attacked Russia for “fighting aimlessly for three and a half years in a war that should have taken a real military power less than a week to win”. Trump added that “Putin and Russia are in BIG economic trouble” and claimed that Russians are finding it “almost impossible to get gasoline”.
In calling out the Kremlin’s failure to defeat Ukraine – a country with a quarter of Russia’s population and an economy 10 times smaller – Trump has put his finger on what some analysts call “Russophrenia”. This is the paradoxical belief that Russia is collapsing economically and militarily and is about to implode – but simultaneously also represents a deadly strategic threat to the Baltics and Nato. Logically, both cannot be true at the same time.
Trump’s “paper tiger” slur depends, of course, on who you’re comparing Russia to. Obviously, by every basic metric, Russia is colossally outgunned and outmanned by the might of Nato – which has 3.5 million active personnel compared to Russia’s 1.32 million, 22,000 military aircraft to Russia’s 4,800, and more than 2,200 warships versus the Russian navy’s fewer than 800.
But while such crude arithmetic might be relevant to armchair warriors wargaming a full-scale conventional war in Europe, the key to Putin’s military successes in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, Crimea and against Ukrainian forces in Donbas in 2014-15 has been his ability to concentrate forces against a much smaller enemy and win quick victories.
It was only in February 2022 that Putin bit off more than he could chew by arrogantly imagining that he would easily be able to punch through Ukrainian defences, occupy Kyiv and quickly install a puppet government. Ukraine’s military proved a match for Russia’s superior forces in 2022, and since then has pushed Moscow’s troops out of more than half the area they briefly occupied at the beginning of the war.
The real measure of a paper tiger, then, isn’t so much the number of men and weapons at your adversary’s disposal but whether there’s true hostile intent and, crucially, if Russia could present a credible threat to Nato. If the recent Zapad 2025 military exercises are anything to go by, the Russian military has become less, not more, threatening as a result of the Ukraine war.
At the Munich Security Conference in July, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky tried to present the quadrennial joint Russian-Belarusian war game as a cover for a possible invasion. “Is this Russian force in Belarus meant to attack Ukraine?” Zelensky asked. “Maybe. Or maybe it’s meant for Poland and the Baltics.” But in the event, the Russian military could spare just 13,000 troops to muster in Belarus for what amounted to little more than an open-air arms fair to which officers from the US (as well as India, China and other allies) were invited as observers.
Instead of showing off new tactics honed on the front lines of Ukraine, where every military tactic has been revolutionised by drone warfare, Russia’s hawkish military blogger community derided Zapad for showcasing outdated tactics such as low-level passes, unguided bombs and parachute drops. According to Mark Galeotti of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London, “Moscow is … militarily at full stretch, not in a position to pick new fights.”
open image in gallery
Donald Trump this week accused Russia of ‘fighting aimlessly for three and a half years in a war that should have taken a real military power less than a week to win’ (AP)
Why, then, has Moscow taken to sending unarmed drones hundreds of kilometres into Poland, sending its jets into Estonian airspace and (possibly) buzzing Oslo and Copenhagen airports with drones? It could be an intimidating bluster or a desire to pick a real fight.
The Kremlin’s logic is often opaque, and its signalling is hard to interpret. If Putin is sending a message to Europe and Nato with his provocative incursions, what is it? Most likely, his focus is on Europe’s current debate about what kind of security guarantees the continent is willing to offer Ukraine.
Despite the Kremlin’s repeated insistence that no foreign troops on the ground will be acceptable, least of all from Nato countries, France’s Emmanuel Macron and Sir Keir Starmer continue to speak of a “reassurance force” in Ukraine. With admirable clarity, Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb, noted this week that security guarantees meant “a willingness to fight Russia”. One likely explanation for Putin’s sabre-rattling is to focus European minds on how deadly serious Russia is in its opposition to Nato troops in Ukraine.
open image in gallery
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has argued that Russia’s territorial ambitions extend beyond their neighbours (Getty)
There’s a crucial distinction to be drawn between Kremlin efforts to subvert and disrupt Europe and having active plans for invasion. Both are threats, and both are aggression – but subversion is a nuisance that can be contained, while the threat of invasion is an existential security hazard.
“Russia poses a direct threat to the European Union,” the EU’s foreign policy chief and former prime minister of Estonia, Kaja Kallas, suggested in July. “The Kremlin has a long-term plan for long-term aggression … Russia was violating the bloc’s airspace, attacking its pipelines, undersea cables and electricity grids, and recruiting criminals to carry out sabotage.”
However, one unforeseen consequence of Russia’s economic dependency on China in the wake of Western sanctions has been the growing influence of Beijing in restraining Russian belligerence, first and foremost in the areas of tactical nuclear weapons use. Only Russia, China and the US possess low-yield battlefield nukes, and preventing their normalisation as a weapon of war has long been an absolute strategic priority for Beijing.
Unlike all-out strategic thermonuclear war, the use of tactical nuclear strikes could create a potentially winnable conflict. And once that happens, the stakes in China’s own potential confrontation over Taiwan will be raised considerably. From the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – which China has not overtly supported, though it has not formally condemned Russia either – Beijing’s military diplomats have exerted strong pressure on their Russian counterparts to keep tactical nukes firmly off Putin’s decision matrix.
Then, of course, there’s the Russian economy, which has been badly battered by the massive expenditure of the war as well as by sanctions, which have made it more difficult – though by no means impossible – for Russia to sell its oil and gas. Add to that Ukraine’s recent campaign of drone strikes that have hit 16 of Russia’s 38 refineries since the start of August. That left Russian fuel exports approaching their lowest level since 2020 and, as Trump pointed out, caused nationwide shortages of gasoline.
open image in gallery
Crowds gather in June to view destroyed Russian tanks in Kyiv. Ukrainian resistance has far exceeded Putin’s expectations (Getty)
After holding up far better than expected against sanctions and the flight of Western businesses, the Russian economy is now drifting firmly into inflation, deficit and recession. Russia is not suffering as badly as Ukraine’s economy, however, and so far there is no sign of the kind of economic crisis that is likely to trigger a popular backlash against Putin. But neither does Russia have the economic wherewithal to build a military that could credibly launch an attack on Europe.
Finally, there’s the key question of intent. While crass television propagandists regularly talk of nuking Britain and marching to Berlin, these people’s place in the Kremlin’s propaganda ecosystem is precisely to say outrageous things in order to cast Putin himself as sane and sensible.
For all his tendency to lie barefacedly, Putin does signal his political demands very clearly – and at no point has he ever threatened to attack Europe or claimed any Nato member’s land. His beef has always been with what he calls Nato’s interference in Ukraine. Keeping Ukraine under Moscow’s influence has been Putin’s obsession for years, and it was the wellspring of his misbegotten invasion in 2022. But after three and a half years of fighting, Putin has not even been able to defeat Ukraine’s army, even at the cost of over 200,000 killed. If he can’t defeat Kyiv, what likelihood is there of him turning on the most powerful military alliance in the world?