Citing intelligence, Finnish President Alexander Stubb said in a weekend interview that Russia is suffering too many losses to open up a second front in the war.
In reality, Putin is too bogged down to make good on that kind of threat, said Kurt Volker, special representative to Ukraine in Trump’s first term and U.S. ambassador to NATO under George W. Bush.
“Take an end to fighting in Ukraine and add three to five years. That’s your timeline,” Volker said.
Bergmann said he doesn’t believe Putin would attack a NATO country while Russian forces are “battered and bruised and bleeding” from the war in Ukraine. But if the fighting starts to slow down and the Russian military is able to regroup, Bergmann said Russia could theoretically develop the capabilities to attack one of the Baltic states by 2028.
Russia’s willingness to accept a large number of casualties would be another advantage in a potential large-scale attack against a NATO ally, according to Bergmann.
“It would be, I think, a bad war for Russia, but their tolerance level for death and for casualties is just really both sickening and worrying,” he said.
In its war against Ukraine, Russia has also demonstrated a high tolerance for military casualties. More than 1.4 million Russian troops have been killed or wounded since the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, according to a recent study by CSIS.
Pointing to the losses, Whitaker, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, said that currently, “Russia is pretty occupied with the situation in Ukraine.”
“It’s not going well. And it would take, even if an immediate pivot, it would still take years to reconstitute, to return to the pre–2022, pre-Ukraine invasion Russian army,” Whitaker added.