Tapa, Estonia

In a pine forest two hours from Estonia’s border with Russia, preparation for war is under way. British, French, American and Estonian soldiers are rehearsing what Nato would do if Vladimir Putin invaded. They’ve brought Challenger II tanks, an F-16 fighter jet and Himars artillery systems – some of the best equipment the West has – for a fortnight of battle simulations. It means preparing for trench warfare, minefields, ambushes and mortar strikes in -20°C and a foot of snow.

Not long ago, the idea of fighting a war against Russia was dismissed as a joke. When Mitt Romney ran for US president he said Moscow was a threat, and Barack Obama mocked him: ‘The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back. The Cold War has been over for 20 years!’ This was America and Europe’s mindset, which led to western countries shrinking their defence budgets and refocusing their militaries for combat in the Middle East. Only five years ago Emmanuel Macron claimed Nato was ‘brain-dead’ and said it would be a ‘huge mistake’ not to re-engage with Russia – Putin did not want war.

Most of the forces are operating in the extreme cold for the first time. Engines don’t start, guns don’t shoot

Then Putin invaded Ukraine. The alliance was ‘jolted awake’, Macron reflected last year, ‘with the worst of electric shocks’. Russia seems to have the edge in Ukraine and European leaders warn it could soon initiate an assault on a Nato member. Estonia’s prime minister, Poland’s head of national security and the Danish defence minister all say Russia could have the soldiers and equipment to launch an attack in three years. To be ready, Nato is staging bigger war games this year than in any since the collapse of the Soviet Union: throughout 2024, around 100,000 troops from across the alliance will rehearse defending European land.

In the Estonian forest, most of the foreign forces are operating in the extreme cold for the first time. Engines sometimes don’t start, guns sometimes won’t shoot, and simple things like opening the doors of armoured trucks become difficult. Much of the equipment isn’t built to work at these temperatures, and the soldiers aren’t used to it either. ‘It’s now not only about your physical endurance, but it’s also how your mind will cope with the weather,’ says Andrus Merilo, the commander of Estonia’s main brigade. He’s a tall, serious man with crooked teeth and a grey beard. He looks up for a fight. Merilo has just been nominated by Estonia’s defence minister, Hanno Pevkur, for the next head of the army. If he is awarded the role, his only job will be to deter a Russian invasion.

Baltic leaders say the north is Nato’s weakest point. Putin could not attack by going through Ukraine or the Black Sea, but Russia shares a 1,500-mile border with Norway, Finland, Estonia and Latvia. The area is quickly becoming militarised. Moscow is creating a new army corps in the rural republic of Karelia, the region which borders Finland and was part of it until 1940. The Finns, who joined Nato only last year, are debating whether their country should host nuclear weapons. The three Baltic states have made plans to build hundreds of bunkers along their borders with Russia and Belarus.

If Putin strikes, Nato’s response has already been planned by Chris Cavoli, a US general who commands the alliance’s military operations. Nato’s ‘Regional Plans’ assign exact forces to various places: X tanks for this town, Y troops for that city. The plans, which are reportedly 4,000 pages long, are classified, but they supposedly apply new military tactics based on how Russia has fought in Ukraine. ‘They go back to thinking about geography, but also about time,’ a senior Nato official says. ‘Where would you need to be? With what forces? When?’

This year’s Nato exercises are all about getting to grips with Cavoli’s plans. Countries whose last experience of combat was against Islamic State terrorists are having to adjust to very different circumstances. The jihadis had little artillery and an air force comprising three stolen jets from the 1970s. Nato would find overwhelming Russian firepower more difficult. In Ukraine, the 470,000 deployed Russian forces can fire 20,000 shells a day and most of its air force is still working.

British soldiers during a Nato exercise in Tapa, Estonia, 6 February 2022 (Getty Images)

British soldiers in Estonia are training to fight in trenches like their great-grandfathers did in western Europe a century ago. James Fern, who leads the British battlegroup, says he asks troops to mimic Russian tactics in his war games. ‘Increased use of artillery,’ he says. ‘Increased use of long-range fires, ballistic missiles.’ In one exercise, the British, French and Americans attack the Estonians with the Challenger II tanks and Himars artillery system. The Estonians have Swedish CV-90 armoured vehicles, a helicopter and XA-188 transport vehicles and are defending two roads winding north through the forest.

All the soldiers wear white camouflage and they shoot lasers from their guns at sensors on the opposing side’s body armour. The guns properly pop, but the tanks and artillery make artificial sounds as if they’re from a retro shoot-’em-up. When the tanks and artillery fire, messages are sent to the base, where they calculate how many people would have died and relay it back to the ground. The ‘dead’ then leave the battle-field. If a fake obstacle such as a minefield needs clearing, the soldiers call the base and doze about for ten minutes to simulate the real delay. Then they carry on.

All this makes the war game quiet and slow. It begins mid-morning and should end near midnight in close combat with night vision binoculars. Mid-afternoon, the attacking troops pause behind a bend in the road and five French troops are sent hundreds of yards ahead through the snow and the pine forest to stake out the Estonian position. Trekking through the deep powder means it takes them a while to get close. ‘It’s the French, what can you do?’ says a soldier watching the exercise.

I ask a British soldier if the army is ready for war with Russia. ‘We’re already fighting a war against migration. We can’t even stop a dinghy,’ he says with a shrug.

US general Chris Cavoli in Vilnius, Lithuania (Getty Images)

Can Cavoli know what the next war will look like? ‘It’s the perennial problem,’ says a Nato official. ‘You prepare for the next war by looking at the last one.’ American and European forces were initially untrained to fight in the small skirmishes they encountered in the Middle East, and no one expected to be getting ready to fight in trenches again in 2024.

Many Nato officials don’t even believe a confrontation with Russia is coming. ‘I’m not sure we’re going to have a war,’ one of Cavoli’s predecessors, Philip Breedlove, tells me. The last British secretary-general of Nato, George Robertson, agrees: ‘I don’t think that Putin has got a desire to cross the Article 5 line.’ Robertson thinks Russia is more likely to attack Moldova or Georgia instead. Putin himself told Tucker Carlson that he would not invade Poland or the Baltic states – for what that’s worth. ‘Why should we do that?’ he said. ‘We’re simply not interested.’ Nato members were talking up an ‘imaginary Russian threat’.

Nato will be worried that Ukraine’s counter-offensive against Russia, using western tactics, was unsuccessful. Co-ordinating artillery fire, missiles and troop movements turned out to be too hard, and rocket strikes didn’t do enough to dislodge Russian positions. Putin is fixing his military’s weaknesses, too. After losing so many soldiers and so much equipment in the frantic first assault on Kyiv, the Russian army built layered fortifications to defend the territory it took in eastern Ukraine. Russia has learned to jam Himars systems.

Even if Nato’s plans and tactics prove correct, the alliance’s members don’t have the kit for a fight against Russia. The Baltics, for example, lack missile systems to protect their airspace. Estonia was promised an air defence battery at the Vilnius Summit last year but still hasn’t got it. All the systems have been sent to Ukraine. ‘Air defence has been given to Ukraine in such big quantities that obviously there is a gap in our capabilities,’ says Pevkur. His troops are relying on Finland’s air defence systems. ‘We just take it as it is,’ he adds. ‘At the moment it is needed more in Ukraine.’ If Russia did invade, Pevkur would have to politely ask Volodymyr Zelensky for his missiles back.

French paratroopers in Estonia during the Spring Storm Nato exercises, 20 May 2023 (Getty Images)

Europe’s supplies are low because defence industries aren’t producing enough. ‘European militaries now have super-sophisticated artillery shells that can pirouette and do all sorts of amazing things,’ says the Nato official. ‘But sometimes you just need large amounts of the slightly more basic stuff.’ Last March, before Ukraine’s counter-offensive, the EU promised to send Zelensky a million 155mm artillery shells by spring of this year. European leaders now say they’ll only deliver 600,000. Pevkur claims the situation is improving and that Europe will be producing two million shells annually, or 170,000 a month, by the end of next year. Not enough to share between Ukraine and Nato if both are at war: Ukraine alone needs 200,000 shells a month to launch and maintain another counter-offensive.

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Nato officials complain that European governments have been too slow at signing weapons contracts and have tried to run defence departments on the cheap for too long. Europe is also slowly realising that it can’t rely on the US to make up its arms shortfall. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump recently said he’d encourage Russians to do ‘whatever the hell they want’ to a European country that scrimped on defence. (‘You gotta pay! You gotta pay your bills!’) This week Trump adviser Keith Kellogg said Nato membership should be tiered, removing some protections for countries that spend less on defence. One former Pentagon official who worked for the Trump administration tells me that if Russia invaded a Nato country, America would need to hold weaponry back for a potential war in Asia.

In this particular war game, there was no winner or loser. The defenders executed a ‘delay operation’, where troops make an orderly retreat and buy time for backup to arrive. If Putin invades Estonia’s eastern border, this is probably the manoeuvre the Estonian army will perform. Some 8,000 personnel and 80,000 reservists will hold the line until the rest of the Nato alliance arrives. Jets will scramble, artillery will be transported to the front, hundreds of thousands of battle-ready soldiers will cross the Atlantic. Others will march through central Europe – and the Russians will be beaten. That’s the plan, anyway./>