Popular Swedish spy thrillers written in the last 20 years have offered variations on the same curtain-raiser for World War III. In the dead of sunless winter, usually around Christmas, the Russians mount a stealth invasion of the island of Gotland in the middle of the Baltic Sea. Defended only by a smattering of token home guard forces, the island falls easily, granting the Russians control of its ports, Viking-era roadways and main airport at Visby. S-400 air defense batteries working in conjunction with the Russian Air Force quickly deny access to the skies over the Baltic Sea region. Electronic warfare cripples a Swedish military response and, absent NATO membership, Stockholm is left relying on incipient partisan warfare efforts and “gravely concerned” demarches from Washington and other Western capitals, as Sweden suffers a Crimea-like prelude to a wider conflict.
In June, in a rather unmissable rejoinder to the Swedish literary industry, NATO mounted its BALTOPS (Baltic Operations) naval exercise, featuring 40 vessels, 25 aircraft and 9,000 troops from 16 allied nations, led by the U.S. Naval Forces Europe and Africa and the U.S. 6th Fleet. For the first time since this annual maritime exercise began in 1972, U.S. Marines and Polish troops ran maneuvers on Gotland with Swedish-made CV90 combat vehicles. BALTOPS 25, declared Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko, was aimed at “achieving superiority in all operational environments: on land, on water, in the air.” Well, quite.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has led to any number of unintended consequences, but none so quick and profound as the consolidation of the Nordic and Baltic regions under the NATO umbrella, following Finland’s and Sweden’s accessions to the alliance in the past two years. Pro-Kremlin commentators fond of claiming that President Vladimir Putin was “provoked” into a war against his neighbor by relentless NATO expansion must confront the self-fulfilling prophecy that war has caused Russia to share a new 800-mile border with NATO.
The Nordic and Baltic states — most of which have long histories of military conflict with, or occupation by, Russia — have also been the most unambivalent and enthusiastic supporters of Ukraine within Europe.
Sweden alone has given close to $9 billion to Ukraine, most of it in military equipment, including two Saab-built Airborne Surveillance and Control aircraft — the first airborne radar donation to Ukraine’s fleet. Speaking at a joint press conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Aug. 25, Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre announced his intent to propose to his parliament an $8.5 billion package for Kyiv for 2026.
The Danes famously committed all of the French-made CAESAR self-propelled howitzers then in their possession to Ukraine’s defense, while Estonia donated its entire arsenal of 155 mm FH70 howitzers and Swedish-made Carl Gustaf recoilless rifles. (The Carl Gustaf, first manufactured in 1946, was used in the early weeks of the war to destroy Russia’s state-of-the-art T-90M “Breakthrough” tanks.) Norway and Denmark have given a combined total of 33 F-16s to Ukraine’s growing jet coalition.
The level of commitment from each country is even more staggering as a share of its gross domestic product. According to the German Kiel Institute for the World Economy, between January 2022 and June 2025, Denmark spent 2.9% of its GDP on helping Ukraine, Estonia spent 2.8%, Lithuania 2.2%, Latvia 1.8%, Sweden 1.4% and Finland 1.3%. Collectively, that adds up to around $29 billion, or about 15% of Europe’s total expenditure on Ukraine since February 2022, when the war started. These six countries constitute just 6.3% of the European Union’s total population, making their per capita contribution two and a half times what it might have been. Individually, these figures are higher than what some NATO allies such as Spain, Italy and Slovakia spend as a percentage of GDP on their own defense.
The Kiel Institute also noted that, since January 2025, when Donald Trump returned to the White House and the U.S. stopped issuing new aid pledges for Ukraine, the Nordic countries and the United Kingdom alone largely made up for the shortfall in security assistance. Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland boosted their aid by $6.8 billion between January and April 2025, and the U.K. did so by $6 billion, some of that money confiscated from frozen Russian assets.
One irony since the start of Moscow’s latest attempt to change the borders of Europe has been that the farther east one goes, with a few notable exceptions, the more “West” one winds up. While other NATO allies cavil and bean-count about what they can and cannot provide Ukraine, citing their own need for military readiness, front-line states have rightly assessed that maintenance for a war being fought now has a greater return on investment than stockpiling for a war that might come later. One can’t blame a nation for being small or geographically vulnerable — only for being cheap and shortsighted. As Estonia’s former chief of staff, Martin Herem, liked to say in the early days of the war: Every Javelin anti-tank missile used on the battlefields of Ukraine to annihilate a Russian tank means one less Russian tank that can invade Estonia. To help the most combat-hardened army in Europe is to help oneself, not least because, should that army be defeated, it would only be incorporated into Russia’s order of battle and used for expeditionary purposes elsewhere in Europe, truly testing the continent’s readiness.
Unfortunately, Nordic and Baltic consolidation hasn’t just meant an enhanced collective defense. It has also invited enemy provocation.
To disrupt ongoing support for Ukraine, the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, has embarked on an expansive sabotage and subversion campaign throughout Europe. Taking a leaf out of the al Qaeda and Islamic State group playbooks, the GRU has decided that it is cheaper and easier to recruit Westerners via the Telegram messaging service and pay them hundreds or thousands of euros in cryptocurrency to carry out attacks than to dispatch its own operatives into the field, many of whom are in any case barred from entering Europe, thanks in part to their unmasking by counterintelligence and law enforcement.
Unit 29155, the GRU group behind the Skripal poisoning in England in 2018 and a series of bombings of Bulgarian and Czech ammunition depots over the last decade and a half, is also behind this effort. The newly created Department of Special Tasks, a GRU outcropping headed by veterans of the original Unit 29155, has begun using Latin Americans as handlers and saboteurs. The department borrows its name from the former KGB department responsible for assassinating Leon Trotsky and Ukrainian nationalists during the Soviet era, although it more resembles a Putinist reboot of the long-defunct Comintern, which not only internationalized the Bolshevik ideology but also laid a fertile seedbed for the recruitment of foreign spies and operatives.
The Associated Press recently mapped the known Russian sabotage operations, which range from assassination plots to arson attacks, disinformation schemes and petty acts of vandalism, showing 59 in total since February 2022, a third of them targeting the Nordic and Baltic states. The true number of operations, yet to be investigated or adjudicated, is likely an order of magnitude higher than that.
Among those that are now well documented are the firebombing of an IKEA warehouse in Vilnius, the firebombing of a Soviet occupation museum in Riga, the smashing of the windows of the vehicle belonging to Estonia’s interior minister in Tallinn and a sustained media operation falsely suggesting the Swedish government was behind Quran burnings when Turkey was still opposed to Sweden’s entry into NATO, owing to the political protection Stockholm has afforded asylees linked to the now-defunct Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Latvia has become a regular transit hub for the movement of incendiary devices that the Russians seek to plant on international cargo planes taking off from Germany.
There is also growing suspicion — if not mounting certainty — that Russia is behind the severing of several underwater cables in the Baltic Sea.
Finland accused Russia’s Eagle S oil tanker, which is a part of Russia’s shadow fleet of ambiguously flagged fuel tankers, of dragging its anchor to damage the Estlink-2 power cable and communication lines between Finland and Estonia on Christmas Day 2024. Eleven cables in the Baltic Sea have been damaged since the start of the war; at least three instances have been traced to Russia.
The Kremlin has now begun to provide naval escorts for its shadow fleet vessels, transforming the shadow fleet into more of a shadow armada. In May, Estonia’s navy tried to intercept the Jaguar, an unflagged tanker sanctioned by the U.K., only to have a Russian Su-35 fighter jet fly by the ship and into Estonian airspace. This was then followed by Russia briefly seizing a Greek-owned oil tanker after it left the Sillamae port in Estonia.
So while the Russians may not yet be ready to make a play for Gotland, they’re by no means too distracted with their latest war to engage in smaller acts of aggression in the neighborhood, at low risk and negligible cost.
The overriding question now facing the Nordic and Baltic states is where their bullishness on Ukraine will lead, given Trump’s desire for a quick and easy peace deal with Russia, if not a wholesale American strategic realignment toward Moscow.
Initially, that realignment appeared to be at the expense of the trans-Atlantic relationship, which has positioned America as the safeguard and steward of European security for more than eight decades. At the start of the second Trump administration, Elon Musk and JD Vance both nakedly interfered in Germany’s pivotal election, endorsing the far-right and pro-Russian Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Vance followed up that performance by going out of his way to insult his summer hosts in the Cotswolds, characterizing the British, of all people, as freeloaders on the Pax Americana — this considering what the U.K. has sacrificed in blood and treasure in support of the U.S. in the last quarter-century.
Now, with tensions between the U.S. and Europe cooling, Trump nonetheless still seems desperate for a grand bargain with Russia. It’s immaterial whether this is because he wants a Nobel Peace Prize to match Barack Obama’s, or because he and his fellow outer-borough developer Steve Witkoff eye gold-plated skyscrapers in Krasnodar, or simply because Trump sees in Putin a kindred spirit and the best friend America just hasn’t made yet. For Trump, Ukraine is a perennial burden, Russia a perennial opportunity.
His much-criticized summit with Putin in Alaska this month produced an enormous propaganda victory for the Russians, ending years of isolation and froideur with their main adversary. But, so far, propaganda is all the Russians have got out of it. The proceedings were noticeably cut short after no breakthrough was achieved.
Trump, it’s true, was characteristically encouraged by Putin’s flattery and manipulation, even to the point of agreeing with the Russian dictator on the alleged fraudulence of mail-in ballots. (This from a country where voter turnout in certain regions has in the past been certified by its own election commission in excess of 140%.) But a subsequent meeting with Zelenskyy at the White House, backed by a phalanx of European leaders, including those Trump is on good terms with (Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Finnish President Alexander Stubb), went reasonably well, given the catastrophe of Zelenskyy’s previous Oval Office visit in February. Moscow’s demand that Ukraine cede all of unoccupied Donetsk, a region with a population of 200,000 and two of the most heavily fortified cities in Ukraine, reportedly became a trickier sell to the consummate dealmaker after it was explained to Trump by the Ukrainians and Europeans that this would be akin to his forfeiting all of eastern Florida.
Europe understands Moscow has no interest in ending its war, according to Politico, and is only indulging Trump’s tedious carousel of peace negotiations because it knows Russia isn’t serious and hopes the American president eventually arrives at the same conclusion. Even if he doesn’t, Europe is already in the cockpit of deciding the future of Ukraine’s defense and security. This has resulted not only from the quiet leadership exhibited by front-line European states but also from Trump’s transactional and Ukraine-skeptic tendencies.
Trump has made a few decisions that are objectively in Kyiv’s long-term interest, even if he doesn’t see it that way. The most important has been his consent to establish the NATO Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL), which enables European countries to buy U.S. weapons for the express purpose of donating them to Ukraine. As it stands today, Ukraine sources about 40% of its war arsenal domestically; 30% comes from Europe and the remaining 30% from the U.S. As time goes by, Ukraine’s own manufacturing capability increases as its dependence on foreign patronage decreases: See the unveiling of Kyiv’s “Flamingo” long-range cruise missile and the newest, longer-range variant of its “Neptune.”
The wrinkle is that America produces indispensable hardware, such as the Patriot air-defense systems and the missiles they fire, as well as the rocket artillery used by High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, a major weapon that helped Ukraine reverse Russia’s advances in late 2022. This is why NATO allies have already committed around $1.5 billion to PURL, with $500 million coming from Denmark, Norway and Sweden. (Copenhagen thus finds itself purchasing U.S. weapons even as Trump frequently declares his intent to annex Greenland, possibly by force, with Americans now reportedly conducting “covert operations” on the island.) All of Europe is rearming at breakneck speed. An analysis by the Financial Times based on radar imagery shows that the real estate used by Europe’s military-industrial complex has increased by over 7 million square meters (2.7 square miles) since 2022.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has touted the PURL program as proof that American taxpayers are no longer footing the bill for Ukraine’s war, a significant MAGA grievance. So if Washington isn’t paying, what leverage does it have in determining how that war draws to a close?
The answer is sanctions relief. There have been no new economic penalties imposed on Russia since Trump took office, whereas the EU has passed three new packages. But Trump hasn’t lifted any preexisting U.S. sanctions either, preferring a drip-drip policy of relaxed enforcement. (The Russian delegation to Anchorage was forced to pay for its jet fuel in cash, owing to these restrictions.)
So far, Trump has imposed his threatened secondary sanctions on Russia, in the form of tariffs, on only one country importing Russian oil and gas — India — while China, a much larger importer, has gone unharmed. And the 25% tariff that Delhi was hit with (on top of the 25% already levied) is a mere twentieth of the percentage proposed by an unvoted-on Senate bill introduced by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham and Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal to punish third parties keeping Russia’s war economy afloat with energy dependency.
The good news is that recognizing the Russian occupation or annexation of Ukrainian territory is not something Trump can do with the stroke of a pen.
There is an abundance of U.S. legislation and executive orders — including from Trump’s first term — that constrain presidential ratification of Russia’s land grab. The most important of these is the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), the legislation passed in 2017 and not-so-quietly envisaged as a congressional manacle on Trump’s unilateral actions when he ran a far less imperious executive branch.
CAATSA stipulates that certain U.S. sanctions on Russia’s energy and banking sectors cannot be lifted without congressional oversight. Executive orders 13660 and 13685, both codified by CAATSA, impose sanctions on anyone taking actions that advance Russia’s claims on Crimea — claims that members of the current administration seem amenable to accepting. The Support for the Sovereignty, Integrity, Democracy, and Economic Stability of Ukraine Act, modified by CAATSA, does likewise for anyone undermining any of Ukraine’s sovereignty (such as in Donetsk). Although there are sanctions in place that are not pursuant to CAATSA or the aforementioned EOs — meaning they can be more easily removed — waiving the CAATSA sanctions themselves requires a vote of Congress.
Trump would therefore need to convince all Republican senators and U.S. representatives, and not a few Democrats, that whatever deal he thinks he can orchestrate with Putin is worth giving the Russians a financial windfall at a time when their economy is deservedly under enormous strain.
Even if that were to happen, U.S. sanctions relief absent coordinated EU relief would have minimal benefit for Russia. “Without Europe on side,” The Economist concluded in March, “Russia’s trade, access to payment systems and foreign investment would all remain severely limited.” If anything, Brussels is headed in the opposite direction.
Kaja Kallas, the former Estonian prime minister and now the outspoken EU foreign minister, announced this month that the EU’s 19th sanctions package on Russia will be voted on in September, whatever the whims of the White House. Brussels, in other words, needn’t seek open confrontation with Washington in pursuing its own pro-Ukraine agenda or strategic autonomy (to use French President Emmanuel Macron’s term to describe Europe’s delinking from the U.S.), if not strategic independence (to use German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s). The EU’s $19.99 trillion GDP surpassed China’s in August; the bloc remains America’s largest trade partner. Russia’s GDP is smaller than that of California.
The Nordic and Baltic states have quietly demonstrated that Europe has done more than its fair share in helping an embattled ally. The continent as a whole is a lot stronger than it looks. Perhaps it’s time it knew its own strength.
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