The plan Ratcliffe was supposedly referring to was a putative Russian attack on Nato<\/a>, something that various Western governments have been warning of for some time<\/a>.<\/p>\n But the reality may be more complex. Indeed, reports on Friday indicated that intelligence sources believe the Russian leader does not want a direct military clash with the alliance<\/a>, yet does have an “appetite” to conduct “hybrid operations” against its member states.<\/p>\n Those, in turn, risk a “miscalculation” that could accidentally trigger a confrontation with Nato, Western officials warned.<\/p>\n So what options might Russia truly be considering? What might be their purpose? And where in the North Atlantic region might a blow \u2013 or the blows \u2013 land?<\/p>\n Option 1: Crimean-style assault on neighbouring Nato states<\/p>\n This is the most discussed of the options on Russian president Vladimir Putin<\/a>‘s desk. Ever since Russian troops fanned out across Crimea and Donbas in 2014, Western planners have theorised a repeat in the Baltic States.<\/p>\n “Activists” \u2013 in reality undercover Russian agents \u2013 would mount protests against some kind of manufactured grievance against the ethnic Russian minority in places such as the Estonian city of Narva or the Latvian town of Daugavpils. Under the cover of the “protests”, Russian troops \u2013 at first unacknowledged and in civilian clothes \u2013 would cross the border and seize control of key towns.<\/p>\n CIA director John Ratcliffe is believed to have warned Russia against pursuing an attack plan – Oliver Contreras\/AFP<\/p>\n In theory, Nato would be caught in a dilemma: Is this a Russian attack, or just an outbreak of street democracy? A matter for the army or for the police? Do you shoot at “protesters”?<\/p>\n And while Nato dithered, uniformed troops might follow to “keep the peace”. Within days, Russia<\/a> might effectively have seized control of a slice of Nato territory.<\/p>\n Assessment: The problem with this scenario is that it is difficult to pull off the same trick twice. Ever since Crimea, the governments of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have been preparing for just such a scenario. This time, such tactics will not be met with hesitation. If equivalents to 2014’s mysterious Crimean “little green men”<\/a> appear on the streets of Narva, they will simply be shot dead.<\/p>\n Option 2: Conventional attack on neighbouring states<\/p>\n This is the worst, but least likely, option: a straight-up conventional assault. A simultaneous incursion launched from Kaliningrad and Belarus cuts the “Suwalki Gap”, the narrow stretch of border between Poland and Lithuania.<\/p>\n Meanwhile Russian paratroopers or marines land on Gotland, the Swedish island in the Baltic Sea, and establish an air-defence umbrella that neutralises Nato’s superior air forces and prevents resupply by air.<\/p>\n The three Baltic States are now cut off from the rest of Nato by both land and air. Battle-hardened drone units fresh from the front in Ukraine flood the skies with attack unmanned aerial vehicles<\/a> (UAVs), destroying isolated Baltic and allied troops \u2013 including a 900-strong British battle group deployed to Estonia \u2013 before they even clap eyes on a Russian soldier to shoot back at.<\/p>\n Nato troops, unused to Ukraine-style drone warfare<\/a>, quickly collapse. Russian ground forces push the remnants aside as they march into Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius.<\/p>\n Assessment: Like the Crimean scenario, this has been widely trained for. Russia’s conventional forces are so entirely committed to Ukraine that there is no large combat-ready unit currently within striking distance of the Estonian border. It also plays to Western strengths. “If Russian troops roll over the border into Estonia, everyone knows the drill,” says Mark Galeotti, an expert on the Russian security services. The Russian invasion force would be hit, and Nato air and missile power would be deployed against their rear area support units.<\/p>\n Soldiers outside Simferopol Airport in Ukraine in 2014, the year Russia invaded Crimea – Sean Gallup\/Getty<\/p>\n Option 3: Incursion<\/p>\n All of which underlines the importance of ambiguity. A Russian helicopter develops engine trouble and makes an “emergency landing” just across the border from Kaliningrad, the Russian Baltic exclave.<\/p>\n A “rescue team” is deployed to secure the site inside neighbouring Poland or Lithuania and bring back the crew. A rescue team, perhaps unarmed, is clearly not the kind of invasion that Article 5 is meant to protect against<\/a>.<\/p>\n But even if they withdraw rapidly, they have demonstrated Russia’s ability to penetrate Nato territory with impunity.<\/p>\n There are multiple variations on the “lost helicopter” scenario, including missiles and drones “accidentally” overflying Ukraine and crashing in Poland, Romania and Moldova. And recent months have seen an increasing number of precisely these kinds of “accidents”.<\/p>\n Assessment: The Centre for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) in a recent report listed five escalating tiers of such attacks, from a single incursion or border probe rising to a mass incursion or high-impact hybrid attack.<\/p>\n They are all designed to “operate below the threshold [of open warfare] to exploit the fact that it is difficult for Western governments to quickly understand what’s happened, identify the culprit and then to define it as either active war or not an active war. So by the time they’ve gone through that process things have moved on and the Russians have got away with it”, says Sam Greene, professor of Russian politics at King’s College London and one of the authors of the CEPA report.<\/p>\n “It’s designed to make it clear that there is damage that could be created at a greater level, to put the fear of God into Western policymakers, and thus to alter their calculations about the degree to which they want to support Ukraine.”<\/p>\n Option 4: False flag<\/p>\n At their simplest, incursions are brief and non-lethal, sending a signal as much as anything. But Western security experts have recently begun to whisper that Russia may be planning something more dramatic.<\/p>\n There are growing reports that the Kremlin has been stockpiling captured or crashed Ukrainian drones that it could use in a false-flag attack to disrupt Nato<\/a> unity and support for Ukraine by pretending that a mass air strike on Russia has gone tragically wrong and has landed instead in a front-line state. Poland, which has already seen a rise in anti-Ukrainian sentiment, might be a tempting target for such a strike.<\/p>\n Assessment: This is more plausible than the Crimean-style assault on neighbouring Nato states, and might have a desired political effect. But while “the shape of the initial incident might be fairly straightforward, it is less clear how Russia would exploit it and turn it into an opportunity to disrupt Nato as the basis for some further action”, says Keir Giles, an associate fellow on Russia and Eurasia at Chatham House. “What exactly is the chain of events between Russia triggering a divisive incident and Russia achieving its objective of neutralising Nato?”<\/p>\n Option 5 : Sabotage in Europe<\/p>\n Russia does not have to confine itself to the front-line states, however. It has already demonstrated its ability to conduct sabotage and assassination operations across Europe, often targeting countries that are perhaps less prepared for trouble than its immediate neighbours.<\/p>\n “When looking for Nato’s weak points, we should be looking beyond the front-line states because those are the hard targets, and there are other countries across Europe that are far more tempting [for Russia], and far juicier targets, which are relatively speaking undefended,” says Giles.<\/p>\n Recent suspicious incidents include the explosive drone discovered near a Ukrainian aircraft<\/a> at Leipzig Airport in Germany on August 4, and a mysterious explosion at an Italian arms depot a week later.<\/p>\n But what the two have in common is that they hurt no one. If Putin is looking for a way to test Nato, a logical next step would be to order such an operation that caused casualties.<\/p>\n The derailing of a train, or bombing a factory that causes not just economic but human loss could provide the “coercive force” that Russia is seeking \u2013 provided it calculates that Nato will not respond forcefully.<\/p>\n “If it’s a sabotage attack with serious loss of life, that’s bad, but do you launch missiles in response to that?” says Galeotti.<\/p>\n Assessment: Because Russia cannot know with certainty what level of force could change Western policy in the way it would want (which is the severing or severely curtailing of support for Ukraine), rather than triggering a forceful response it would regret, such operations are fraught with risk.<\/p>\n “The risk there isn’t that we are sleeping while Russia is preparing an invasion,” says Greene. “The risk is that because this doesn’t operate with a clear risk-reward calculation from the Russian side, that they make a mistake.”<\/p>\n “Say a drone flying in the vicinity of Schiphol or Charles de Gaulle Airport collides with an airliner and creates 200 or 300 civilian casualties on Nato territory. All of a sudden there needs to be a response, a much more vigorous response than any of the responses we’ve seen. Suddenly we have escalation neither side wanted.”<\/p>\n Option 6 : Cyber attack<\/p>\n Cyber warfare largely falls into the same category as sabotage. It can strike anywhere, is difficult to attribute and can be potentially devastating.<\/p>\n It also falls into the ambiguous “non-military, but still potentially Article 5-ish territory”, says Galeotti.<\/p>\n Technically, systemic cyber attacks are considered grounds for triggering Nato’s collective defence clause. But by nature they are difficult to attribute and it is not clear what a response would entail.<\/p>\n Healthcare systems are particularly vulnerable to being overwhelmed, says Giles.<\/p>\n A hypothetical attack that “crashed the NHS blood transfer computer systems, so no one knows where the O positive blood is to be found” would certainly cost lives and spread alarm, points out Galeotti.<\/p>\n It need not be as fatal. Crashing a stock exchange to spread market panic or shutting down a key airport could cause massive inconvenience that could impact political decision making.<\/p>\n Assessment: Like all the other options, experts expect the Kremlin to calibrate such attacks to a level just below that which would trigger a substantial retaliation.<\/p>\n And therein lies the key to deterring it. If the CIA’s Ratcliffe has made clear to Russia<\/a> that there will be a much quicker process of attribution and response than Russia has become accustomed to, “that might begin to impose some discipline on their activities”, argues Greene.<\/p>\n![\"CIA](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/https:\/\/media.zenfs.com\/en\/the_telegraph_258\/9be3d62bfe577e712c4eaf9fe6dd75e5.jpg\"\/)
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