Is war coming our way? The warning last month from Admiral Rob Bauer, the chairman of Nato’s Military Committee, indicates as much. ‘Anything can happen at any time’, Bauer said, as he suggested Nato should prepare for a conflict with Russia in the next 20 years.

No less alarming – in fact, rather more so – is the language emanating from Moscow. In a UN speech at the end of January, foreign minister Sergei Lavrov urged the West to listen to the Kremlin’s arguments ‘while there is still time’. TV propagandist Vladimir Solovyov speaks regularly about nuking Europe, and just last week his fellow attack dog Margarita Simonyan (head of RT) posted on her Telegram account that ‘we’ll carry a machine gun till we liberate the territories where people are glad to see us, those who are hiding the Russian flag somewhere, even in their hearts’.

‘Russia’s borders do not end,’ said Putin only half-joking to school kids in 2016. It has since become a slogan on Moscow billboards.

Shady incidents since in which Russian involvement is suspected may well just be dry runs

Alongside this increasingly bellicose rhetoric, Russia’s military spending is set to reach a staggering one third of the country’s federal budget in 2024. There has also been increased conscription and, in schools, war-readiness classes. Just what is Moscow planning? An attack beyond the borders of Ukraine?

The dominant image of a major war in the minds of many people is based on the Second World War, with endless columns of armoured vehicles driving forth and the dynamic capture of vast new territories. Such antiquated methods proved calamitous for the Kremlin in the first months of the Ukrainian war. Despite its ability to restore weapons stocks faster than expected, it has neither the troops nor the ammunition to support a new war on this scale without ending the current one. Even assuming Russia ultimately prevails in its war of attrition against Kyiv, it would still, according to the Swedish defence research agency, take at least five to ten years to recover its strength.

This blend of aggressive rhetoric and military weakness suggests that any attack on Europe in the next few years will instead be unconventional and hybrid in nature, the kind of shape-shifting warfare the West is almost certainly unprepared for. Rather than conquering territory, it will focus on exploiting Europe’s weaknesses, while trying to reverse the expansion of Nato and bringing Ukraine into Russia’s ‘sphere of influence’; Putin stated the last two aims openly in 2021.

It may also mean the cultivation of potential so-called ‘fifth column’ saboteurs abroad. For countries such as those in the Baltic states, the potential Achilles’ heel there is their Russian minorities. The alleged ‘violations’ of their rights could possibly serve as a handy pretext for the Kremlin to step in under the hoary old cliché that ‘Russia looks after its own’; Putin recently thundered on about Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania in those terms.

As with the annexation of Crimea, one can imagine attacks in the Baltic states involving armed groups of masked men seizing parliaments and pronouncing the creation of ‘People’s Republics’. Then the Russian army would go in for ‘humanitarian’ purposes and to ‘ensure security’ during any referenda on annexations. Given that there are only 3,000 Nato soldiers currently deployed to the Baltics, the outlook is bleak. Their job would be just to hold up the invaders until the main bulk of the alliance’s army arrived. Should the attack prove fast enough, there may be no time to respond.

What are Putin’s designs for countries such as the UK and Germany

Documents leaked from the German ministry of defence quite credibly envisage a Nato/Russia standoff at the Suwalki Gap, the strip of land along the border between Poland and Lithuania. Seizing the Gap – often called ‘the most dangerous place on earth’ – would mean isolating all three Baltic States from continental Europe and their possible reinforcements. The move would simultaneously connect the Kaliningrad enclave with Belarus, a Russian satellite.

Though such a move would constitute an attack on a Nato state, the alliance’s article 5 does not call explicitly for military retaliation but merely ‘collective assistance’ as is ‘deemed necessary’. This will surely in good time prompt heated arguments over whether to attack Russian troops outright or to take a more toothless approach. It’s not hard to imagine where the splits will come from: Northern and Eastern Europe, the main providers of aid to Ukraine, versus the more cautious countries of the South and central continent, whose support has been more half-hearted.

Should Donald Trump return to power, the same question will likely arise as posed by the French far-right in 1939: ‘Why die for Danzig?’ Yet failure to retake territory even as comparatively minuscule as the Suwalki Gap would leave Western credibility in tatters and potentially amplify the voices insisting on accepting Putin’s terms ‘while there is still time’.

But what are Putin’s designs for countries such as the UK and Germany? Not sharing any borders with Russia, they are likely to fall victim to a more covert approach by Russia. This might involve sabotage and diversions, carried out by squads from the GRU – the Russian foreign intelligence agency – and follow on from the 2018 poisoning of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, or the assassination of a Chechen refugee in Berlin the following year.

Shady incidents since 2022 in which Russian involvement is suspected – the cutting of railway ground cables in northern Germany or undersea power lines in Denmark – may well just be dry runs for further chaos-inducing measures should direct military conflict break out on the continent.

The disruption to global trade caused by any escalation in conflict could only benefit ‘Russia-friendly’ leaders like Hungary’s Orban or Slovakian PM Robert Fico. The Kremlin would be sure to swiftly conclude trade deals with these countries, promising cheap gas and ‘security’ in return for ‘non-involvement in the dispute of two Slavic nations’.

Any effective defence against such hybrid warfare will need to be multi-layered. Apart from the ramping up of military capacity already underway in Europe, different scenarios should be war-gamed and in-depth defensive lines (trenches and minefields) built along critical sections of Nato’s borders. As for the Baltics, Nato’s presence there should be massively increased.

Yet this misses out the most important point of all: that the surest defence against Russia is to secure its defeat in Ukraine. The need for increased military aid must be presented to Western voters not as some abstract act of charity, but as the most efficient (and possibly cheapest) investment in their own long-term freedom. Putin’s loss of current military gains in places like Zaporizhzhia or Mariupol would make for a much safer Europe – even if he remains in power.

Meanwhile, Western governments should expect the unexpected and think the unthinkable. As retired the US General Kevin Ryan said recently: ‘Getting ready could be enough to avert a wider war. Not getting ready could invite one.’