PUTIN IS PLAYING A DANGEROUS GAME WITH NATO / THE FINANCIAL TIMES OP EDITORIAL

Putin is playing a dangerous game with Nato

All is far from quiet on the alliance’s eastern front

Gideon Rachman

© Ann Kiernan

How committed is Nato to the defence of the Baltic states? 

That was the question that Vladimir Putin was indirectly posing, when Russian fighter planes violated Estonian airspace last week.

Nato’s public position is unequivocal: the 32-country alliance will defend every inch of its territory. 

That commitment is on display at Estonia’s Tapa military base, near the Russian frontier. 

Tapa — which literally means “kill” in Estonian — was once the site of a Soviet air base. 

Now it is the main base for the Estonian army and a British-led Nato battle group.

Troops from the Royal Tank Regiment had recently arrived when I visited Tapa last week. 

Together with a smaller detachment from France, they have an impressive array of firepower on the base — including Challenger 2 battle tanks, the Archer artillery system and Griffon armoured personnel carriers. 

The British, French and Estonian troops have an integrated command structure and would go into battle together — if there were ever a Russian invasion of Estonia.

The troops in Tapa are trained to repel a full-scale Russian attack. 

But western strategic planners think it is more likely that Russia would initially proceed incrementally — mounting small ambiguous operations designed to test Nato’s reactions and unity. 

Last week’s violation of Estonian airspace fits that pattern, particularly since it followed a large incursion of Russian drones into Poland the previous week. 

Some of the drones were shot down by Nato aircraft and the allies have since deployed more planes to the eastern frontier.

Nato will discuss how to respond to the Estonian incursion later this week. 

There are some in the alliance who argue that, in future, Nato should shoot down Russian planes that violate alliance airspace. 

But others, particularly in the US, believe that would be a dangerous escalation.

Russia may gradually ramp up its provocations to test these latent divisions within Nato. 

One long-discussed scenario is the incursion of Russian ground troops into one of the Baltic states — perhaps on the pretext of defending ethnic Russians.

The Kremlin’s ultimate goal is to demonstrate that Nato’s Article Five mutual security guarantee is worthless. 

If the Russians could do that, then they might try to pick off smaller European states one-by-one — without ever having to take on the combined might of Nato.

Uncertainty about Washington’s response is the key to Moscow’s probing. 

The US provides about 40 per cent of Nato’s military assets in Europe and some of its most advanced capabilities. 

There are also American troops in the Baltic states. 

A Himars artillery unit recently conducted training at the Tapa base and a US tank company is expected to arrive soon.

But if the Russians ever staged a major incursion into Estonia or another Nato member, there are obvious questions about how Donald Trump would respond. 

As Gabrielius Landsbergis, a former foreign minister of Lithuania put it to me last week, “If there is an incursion and attack . . . what can Putin expect? 

The American Sixth Fleet coming into the Baltics or a call to meet in Alaska?”

Just beneath the surface, there is real tension between the Trump administration and its Baltic allies. 

In Washington, I have heard complaints about the “Estonianisation” of European foreign policy — a reference to the fact that Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief, is Estonia’s former prime minister. In parts of the Trump administration, the Balts are regarded as dangerously aggressive in their attitude to Putin. 

At a recent high-level Pentagon meeting, Baltic officials were accused of being “ideological” in their opposition to Russia.

The suspicion between the Balts and the US is mutual. 

In the corridors of the Estonian foreign ministry last week — just outside the offices of the most senior officials — I saw a large reproduction of the vote tally from last February’s UN debate on Ukraine, in which the US voted with the Russians. 

The message seemed clear. 

Don’t assume that Trump’s America is on our side.

The largest European countries are much more consistent than the Trump administration in their insistence on the need to counter Russian aggression. 

But they are also very nervous about the idea of fighting Russia without the US alongside them — witness the agonising about whether a European “reassurance force” could ever be deployed to Ukraine without an American “backstop” behind it.

But while Nato has to deal with uncertainty, so do the Russians. 

Trump is so volatile that his reactions in an international crisis cannot be predicted. 

Many Trump-watchers assumed that he would never authorise US participation in the bombing of Iran. 

And yet that is precisely what he did, earlier this year.

Even if America stood aside in a crisis in the Baltics, the British, French, Germans and Canadians all have troops deployed there that are pledged to fight. 

Poland and Finland — both well-armed nations — know that their own security is closely entwined with the fate of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. 

They too would probably defend the Baltic states.

It would be a reckless gamble for Putin to test the will of the Nato countries to defend the alliance’s eastern frontier. 

Unfortunately, as the world discovered when Russian forces advanced on Kyiv in 2022, Putin is more than capable of making reckless gambles.