Europe is preparing for war with Russia. Nobody has told its citizens what that war would mean

European governments speak increasingly of readiness, rearmament and confrontation with Moscow. But they have not explained which targets might be attacked, whether NATO would remain united, who would pay for the conflict or how a conventional war could be stopped before it became nuclear.

Europe is preparing its citizens for the idea of war with Russia, but not for the reality of it. Governments speak of defence budgets, weapons production, readiness dates and the necessity of deterring Moscow. They rarely describe what would happen after the first Russian missile landed on European soil.

The language is deliberately administrative. Europe must strengthen its resilience, expand its military industries and be ready to fight by the end of the decade. NATO members have committed themselves to spending 5 per cent of national income on defence and security by 2035. The European Union intends to mobilise as much as €800 billion for military readiness.

Britain, France, Germany and other European states are producing longer range weapons and supporting Ukraine’s ability to strike targets inside Russia. These policies are presented as deterrence, not preparation for an offensive war.

Behind them lies a powerful argument. Russia invaded Ukraine. It has used military force to change borders, devastated Ukrainian cities and repeatedly invoked its nuclear arsenal. A Europe incapable of defending itself may invite rather than prevent further aggression.

But the moral case for helping Ukraine does not remove the obligation to explain where European policy might lead. Deterrence is discussed as though it were a technical programme: spend the money, build the factories, deploy the weapons and persuade Russia to retreat.

What happens if Russia does not retreat is discussed far less often.

Recent arguments advanced by retired Royal Navy Commodore Steve Jermy, political scientists Jeffrey Sachs and John Mearsheimer, economist Richard Wolff and Russian based commentator Stanislav Krapivnik approach the danger from very different directions. They do not possess equal authority, and many of their individual claims require considerable qualification.

Taken together, however, they expose the missing part of Europe’s war debate. Jermy describes how a direct conflict might begin. Mearsheimer explains the logic by which Moscow might try to restore deterrence. Krapivnik demonstrates how Russian hardliners are already discussing European targets. Wolff asks who will pay for rearmament. Sachs identifies NATO enlargement as a principal cause of the confrontation and proposes a different security architecture.

None proves that Russia is about to attack Europe. They do demonstrate that European policy is moving along an escalation path whose consequences have never been candidly presented to the people who would have to endure them.

Moscow is listening too

European leaders say they must be ready for war with Russia by 2030. The intended message is one of resolve. Rearmament will deter Moscow, protect NATO territory and reduce Europe’s dependence upon the United States.

Russia may hear a different message. It may conclude that Europe is using the remaining years of the decade to prepare for a war it presently lacks the strength to fight.

“Let’s not assume that Russia is going to wait, doing nothing until 2030, until we’re ready,” Jermy told Tucker Carlson in an interview developing a scenario he had previously set out in writing.

That does not mean Moscow intends to launch a preventive war. But a serious strategy must consider how its actions appear from the other side.

Rearmament undertaken for deterrence can be interpreted as preparation for attack. Russia then expands its own forces or considers acting before Europe is ready. European governments treat the Russian response as confirmation of hostile intentions and accelerate their preparations.

Each side describes its conduct as defensive and the conduct of the other as threatening. Both can act according to what they regard as rational security requirements and still move closer to war.

The immediate danger lies in the erosion of the boundary between supporting Ukraine and participating directly in attacks upon Russia.

European governments maintain that Ukraine has the right to defend itself and that supplying weapons does not make them belligerents. Moscow argues that the distinction becomes increasingly artificial when NATO states provide longer range weapons, intelligence, communications, targeting assistance and technical support for attacks deep inside Russian territory.

The point is not that Russia’s interpretation must be accepted. It is that the boundary cannot be made safe merely by Europe declaring where it believes the boundary lies.

Have European governments determined how far their weapons may travel into Russia? What degree of targeting assistance turns an arms supplier into a participant? Does Moscow recognise the same distinction? What happens when it does not?

The war in the air

Mearsheimer distinguishes between the war on the ground and the expanding war through the air.

Russia continues to advance slowly in eastern Ukraine, but the density of drones, surveillance systems, mines and artillery makes rapid territorial movement exceptionally difficult. Ukraine has sought to compensate for its disadvantages in manpower and ammunition by striking targets far behind the front.

Its drones and missiles have reached refineries, airfields, ships, military installations and other targets inside Russia. Russia, in turn, has intensified its bombardment of Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities.

The territorial front may move slowly while the strategic reach of the war expands rapidly. That is the contradiction now making the conflict more dangerous.

An attack on an oil refinery can be presented as a means of weakening Russia’s ability to finance and supply its invasion. An attack on a strategic bomber may be intended to reduce Russia’s conventional striking power. But the same bomber may also form part of Russia’s nuclear forces.

The attacker may believe it has conducted a limited operation. The defender may believe that an element of its nuclear deterrent is being weakened in preparation for something larger.

This is how military actions acquire meanings their planners did not intend.

The first missile lands in Europe

Jermy’s scenario begins with European supplied weapons being used against targets well inside Russia. Moscow warns that the factories producing those weapons and the facilities supporting their use have become part of the conflict. The attacks continue.

Russia then launches a limited conventional strike against a missile or drone production facility in Britain, France, Germany or Poland.

It would not need to begin by attacking a capital or attempting to occupy NATO territory. Moscow could select an installation directly connected to weapons reaching Ukraine, describe the strike as proportionate and offer to stop if attacks deep inside Russia ceased.

Europe would then confront an almost impossible choice.

A failure to respond militarily could be presented as the collapse of NATO deterrence. If Russia could attack a factory inside the alliance without suffering serious consequences, what would prevent it from attacking another?

But a European counterattack would cross the line into an undisguised war between nuclear powers. NATO aircraft or missiles would be striking Russian territory directly. Moscow would no longer be fighting only Ukraine.

Deterrence does not eliminate the need for decisions after deterrence has failed. It makes those decisions more politically dangerous. Restraint can look like capitulation. Retaliation can open the next stage of a conflict neither side originally intended.

What Article 5 really promises

The first response would be political. The attacked country would seek consultations with its NATO allies and could invoke Article 5, under which an attack against one member is treated as an attack against all.

Article 5 is a formidable political guarantee. It is not an automatic declaration of total war.

Every ally is required to assist the country attacked, but each government takes such action as it considers necessary. That may include armed force, but the treaty does not require every member to send troops or make the same contribution.

Jermy imagines Hungary declining to fight and Spain deciding that direct participation is not in its national interest. Poland and the Baltic states might demand a powerful response. Britain, France and Germany might insist that the credibility of the alliance depended upon retaliation. Other members could supply intelligence, logistics and air defence while refusing to attack Russia.

The argument would depend upon the circumstances. Had Russia given a warning? Were civilians killed? Was the target producing weapons used deep inside Russia? Had Washington approved those attacks? Was Moscow presenting its strike as an isolated act or the opening of a wider campaign? Had it offered to stop?

NATO would not necessarily disintegrate. It possesses integrated command structures, common plans and decades of military cooperation. But the opening hours of a European and Russian war would be a political contest within the alliance as well as a military contest with Moscow.

The decision in Washington

The most important decision would be made not in Brussels but in Washington.

European NATO possesses considerable military power, but many of its most important enabling capabilities remain heavily dependent upon the United States: intelligence, satellites, command systems, aerial refuelling, strategic transport, missile defence, logistical support and the nuclear umbrella.

The question would not simply be whether America had abandoned NATO. It would be what kind of assistance Washington was prepared to provide, and how much.

The United States could supply intelligence, reinforce air defences and move naval and air forces into Europe without attacking Russia. It could support limited strikes against the Russian forces responsible. It could conduct its own attacks. At the furthest end of the spectrum, it could deploy large numbers of American forces into a continental war.

Jermy doubts that Washington would willingly send its soldiers to fight Russia on European soil, particularly if an American administration believed that European governments had precipitated the crisis through attacks it considered reckless.

The opposing argument is powerful. The credibility of American alliances across the world would be at stake. Refusing to defend Europe might encourage Moscow and alarm every American ally. A president could decide that intervention was less dangerous than the collapse of NATO.

That does not resolve the uncertainty. It demonstrates it.

Europe’s present strategy depends upon an American decision that has not yet been made, in circumstances that do not yet exist.

A continent that cannot defend every target

If European governments retaliated, they would probably rely initially upon air power and longer range weapons. Targets could include the Russian launch sites responsible for the original attack, air bases, radar installations, ammunition stores and command centres.

European air forces are technologically advanced. Russia’s air defences are neither impenetrable nor uniformly effective. NATO collectively commands resources far greater than critics sometimes acknowledge.

But Europe faces a problem of scale. Protecting a military formation is not the same as protecting every capital, port, power station, refinery, air base, weapons factory and railway junction across an entire continent.

Europe possesses sophisticated air defence systems. It does not necessarily possess enough of them to defend Europe.

Sustained attacks combining cheap drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles would force governments to decide which targets received protection. Every interceptor assigned to a military installation would be unavailable to defend a city, refinery or electricity plant. Stocks could be consumed faster than factories could replace them.

The public has not been told which regions would be prioritised, which infrastructure could not be protected, how long interceptor stocks might last or whether civil defence systems could cope with repeated attacks.

These are not minor operational questions. They determine what war readiness means for the people expected to live through it.

The war enters civilian life

Jermy assumes that European retaliation would produce a second and more damaging Russian response. Moscow could expand its target list beyond weapons factories to include air bases, ports, railway junctions, fuel depots, electricity infrastructure, communications networks and the systems supporting Europe’s military effort.

A direct conflict between Russia and NATO might therefore look very different from the armoured invasion imagined during the Cold War. Russia would not need to send tanks towards the English Channel. It could attempt to disable the systems that allow modern European society to function.

A missile striking a liquefied natural gas terminal, refinery or major oil port could have consequences far beyond the immediate destruction. Fuel prices would rise. Industrial production could fall. Shipping and aviation would be disrupted. Farming, construction and food distribution would compete with military forces for diesel.

Governments would face pressure to support households just as the costs of war, reconstruction and rearmament were increasing.

Europe reduced its dependence on Russian energy for an understandable security reason. Reliance upon an adversarial supplier created an obvious vulnerability. But the continent exchanged one form of exposure for another. It now depends more heavily upon maritime supply, global markets, liquefied natural gas cargoes and a limited number of ports and terminals.

Those alternatives provide diversification in peacetime. In war, concentrated coastal infrastructure offers an adversary a valuable target list.

What Russian hardliners are already saying

The possibility of attacking European infrastructure is not confined to Western scenario planning. It is already being advocated by uncompromising voices in pro Russian commentary.

Stanislav Krapivnik, a Russian based commentator who says he formerly served in the United States Army, set out an exceptionally severe version of the argument during an interview with Norwegian political scientist Glenn Diesen.

Krapivnik argued that Russia had weakened its deterrence by failing to retaliate directly against the NATO countries supplying Ukraine. He advocated conventional attacks on selected European states intended to make examples of them and force their governments to retreat.

The targets he identified included weapons manufacturers, corporate headquarters, bridges, gas storage facilities, liquefied natural gas terminals, ports and government buildings. He also advocated attacks upon the political and industrial leadership responsible for the war.

Krapivnik holds no known official position in the Russian government or armed forces. There is no public evidence that he speaks for the Kremlin or the Russian General Staff. His statements should not be presented as Russian policy.

But dismissing them as irrelevant would also be a mistake. They show that the targets appearing in Jermy’s hypothetical scenario are already being discussed by voices demanding that Moscow abandon restraint.

The argument represented by Krapivnik is that Russia’s restraint has not been interpreted by NATO as prudence. It has been interpreted as weakness. Every attack Russia absorbs without striking the Western states enabling Ukraine supposedly encourages a more ambitious attack.

That logic mirrors the argument made by European supporters of escalation. European leaders maintain that restraint in the face of Russian threats would invite further aggression. Russian hardliners contend that restraint in the face of NATO involvement has already done exactly that.

Both sides therefore approach the same dangerous conclusion. Each believes peace can be preserved only by demonstrating a greater willingness to escalate than the other.

The attempt to restore deterrence

Mearsheimer approaches the danger from a less inflammatory but more systematic direction.

He argues that Russia may eventually attack NATO territory not because it wants to conquer Europe, but because Moscow believes deterrence has ceased to operate.

From the Western perspective, support for Ukrainian strikes is legitimate assistance to a country defending itself. From the Russian perspective, NATO states are helping Ukraine attack Russian territory while assuming their own territories will remain immune.

If Russia continually absorbs such attacks without imposing costs on the states enabling them, Russian strategists may conclude that Europe has no incentive to exercise restraint.

The purpose of a Russian attack would then be coercive rather than territorial. Moscow might launch a limited conventional strike against a military or industrial target before demanding an end to Western assistance for attacks deep inside Russia.

This is the same sequence described by Jermy and advocated much more aggressively by Krapivnik. The first strike would be intended to restore a boundary that Moscow believes the West no longer respects.

But an attack intended in Moscow as a limited demonstration would not necessarily be understood as limited in Brussels, London, Paris or Washington. NATO could regard any strike on alliance territory as the beginning of a larger campaign and conclude that failing to retaliate would destroy Article 5.

When nuclear weapons enter the calculation

Mearsheimer’s most disturbing warning concerns what might happen if conventional attacks failed to change Western conduct.

Russian strategists could contemplate limited nuclear use, perhaps involving a small number of weapons, to demonstrate that Moscow was prepared to move further up the escalation ladder.

There is no public evidence that Russia has decided to use nuclear weapons against Europe. Nor is there sufficient evidence that such a decision commands widespread support among Russian leaders. The danger lies in the logic that could develop if Moscow concluded that conventional deterrence had failed.

The expression limited nuclear use is itself dangerously reassuring. A nuclear attack can be limited in number or explosive power. Its political and strategic consequences cannot be limited with the same confidence.

NATO could respond with conventional force, nuclear weapons or some combination of the two. Russia might interpret even a conventional response as preparation for a larger nuclear attack. Both sides would disperse forces, raise readiness and shorten the time available for decisions.

Britain and France possess nuclear arsenals. Russia possesses a much larger one. If Russia attacked Germany or Poland while initially avoiding British and French territory, London and Paris would confront the central question of extended deterrence.

Would either government place its own cities at risk to prevent the coercion or defeat of another NATO country?

An unequivocal no would weaken the alliance’s deterrent. An unequivocal yes would describe a willingness to contemplate national destruction.

The danger is not confined to a leader deliberately ordering unlimited nuclear war. It is that each side takes what it regards as a controlled step intended to frighten the other into stopping.

Deterrence could become a contest in which both parties attempt to demonstrate that they are less frightened by catastrophe than their opponent.

The price of readiness

There is another question Europe has not answered clearly. Who will pay for the military transformation it has promised?

NATO’s 5 per cent commitment includes at least 3.5 per cent of national income for core defence and as much as 1.5 per cent for wider security, infrastructure and resilience. The European Union’s Readiness 2030 programme is intended to mobilise as much as €800 billion.

Not all of that money will be removed directly from hospitals, pensions or education. Governments can borrow, increase taxes, reduce other expenditure or attempt to generate stronger economic growth. Some security expenditure can also strengthen transport, communications and civilian infrastructure.

But no financing method makes the cost disappear.

Borrowing creates future interest payments. Higher taxation reduces household or corporate income. Spending reductions remove resources from existing services. Money committed to ammunition and military factories cannot simultaneously be spent on housing, schools, health care or industrial modernisation.

Economist Richard Wolff, speaking in a presentation produced by Democracy at Work, places this choice at the centre of European rearmament.

“Where’s that money going to come from?” Wolff asks.

His answer is that European workers will ultimately bear much of the burden through some combination of taxation, weaker public services, reduced social provision and lower living standards. Governments, he argues, cannot obtain consent for that sacrifice without portraying Russia as an overwhelming danger.

Wolff goes further and argues that European capitalism sees the weakening of Russia as a means of reversing Europe’s economic decline. That broader theory is speculative. The simpler economic question does not depend upon it.

Europe has maintained political stability partly through a social settlement providing public health care, pensions, education and protection against unemployment. Rearmament on the scale proposed will test whether that settlement can be preserved while governments also finance energy security, industrial reconstruction and support for Ukraine.

The argument for rearmament is that the cost of deterring Russia is smaller than the cost of failing to deter it. A successful Russian attack on NATO territory would impose human and economic losses far greater than preventive military expenditure.

But that argument still requires figures, priorities and consent. Governments should explain how much readiness will cost, how it will be financed, which public services will be protected and what citizens will be expected to surrender.

Defence expenditure is frequently presented as a percentage to be reached. For households, it may eventually become a tax increase, a postponed railway, a smaller pension settlement, a longer hospital wait or a public service that no longer exists.

The security system Europe abandoned

Diplomatic contact alone will not resolve this danger. Europe must confront the decision that helped create it: the expansion of NATO towards Russia after the Cold War.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs argues that NATO enlargement was not merely part of the historical background. It was a principal cause of the confrontation that produced the war in Ukraine.

That conclusion does not legally or morally justify Russia’s invasion. Causes and justifications are different questions. Russia made the decision to invade and bears responsibility for it. But an invasion can be unlawful and destructive while also emerging from a security conflict that other governments helped create.

At the end of the Cold War, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev proposed a common European home. The Warsaw Pact would disappear, the division of Europe would end and Russia would become part of an inclusive continental security system.

The Warsaw Pact was dissolved. The Soviet Union withdrew from Eastern Europe and then ceased to exist. NATO survived and expanded.

American and German officials gave Soviet leaders important verbal assurances during the negotiations over German reunification that NATO would not move eastwards. Those assurances were not written into a treaty prohibiting every future enlargement, and their intended geographical scope remains disputed.

But the political message received in Moscow was that Soviet acceptance of German reunification would not be followed by NATO advancing towards Russia.

NATO admitted Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999. In 2004 it admitted seven more countries, including Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, bringing the alliance directly to Russia’s border.

The countries joining NATO possessed their own agency and compelling historical reasons for fearing Moscow. Poland and the Baltic states had experienced invasion, occupation and Soviet domination. They sought NATO membership because they did not trust Russia and wanted American protection.

But an action can be understandable from one country’s perspective and destabilising from another’s. Eastern Europe’s desire for protection did not eliminate the strategic effect of moving an American led military alliance towards Russia.

The decisive step came at NATO’s Bucharest summit in 2008. Germany and France resisted giving Ukraine and Georgia an immediate route into the alliance because they understood the danger. NATO nevertheless declared that both countries would eventually become members.

The result was the most dangerous possible compromise. Ukraine received a promise of future membership without the protection of actual membership. Russia received formal notice that NATO intended eventually to cross what Moscow had repeatedly described as a critical security boundary.

The warning did not come only from Russia. American diplomats and strategic thinkers had predicted that NATO expansion, particularly into Ukraine, could provoke a severe Russian response. The danger was understood and the policy continued.

Ukraine became the point at which two security principles collided. Kyiv asserted its sovereign right to choose NATO membership. Russia asserted that Ukrainian membership would place the infrastructure of a hostile military alliance along a strategically intolerable frontier.

The West treated membership as a decision concerning Ukraine and NATO alone. Russia treated it as a matter directly affecting Russian national security. Neither accepted the other’s definition.

NATO enlargement did not make war inevitable. Moscow retained alternatives to invasion. But enlargement created the security confrontation in which war became increasingly likely.

The alternative is not surrender

Sachs argues that Ukrainian neutrality should now form part of a wider settlement. Ukraine would remain sovereign and politically independent but would not become a member of an alliance directed against Russia. Its protection would depend upon international guarantees, limits on foreign forces and a broader European agreement.

The objection is formidable. Ukraine was formally nonaligned when Russia seized Crimea in 2014. It had also surrendered the nuclear weapons stationed on its territory in exchange for assurances that failed to prevent either the loss of territory or the later invasion.

Ukrainians can reasonably ask why another promise of neutrality would be more reliable than the undertakings already broken.

Russia can answer that neutrality without restrictions on weapons, foreign military infrastructure and longer range strike systems would be merely a label. Europe can answer that neutrality imposed through invasion would reward aggression and deny Ukraine the sovereign choice exercised by other European states.

These objections do not eliminate the need for an inclusive security system. They define what that system must overcome.

A serious settlement would require more than a declaration of neutrality. It would need enforceable protections for Ukraine, reciprocal limits on military deployments, verification of longer range weapons, restored arms control, emergency communications and consequences for any party violating the agreement.

It would also require Europe and Russia to recognise that neither can obtain absolute security. Russia cannot be allowed to dictate the foreign policy of every neighbouring state. NATO cannot assume that its military infrastructure can move indefinitely towards Russia without producing consequences.

Europe’s choice is not limited to rearmament or surrender. It can attempt to construct a system in which Ukraine is protected, Russia is contained but not excluded, and military restraint is reciprocal rather than demanded from one side alone.

Such a settlement may now be extraordinarily difficult. Invasion, annexation, sanctions, broken agreements and mass death have destroyed trust. But the alternative is to continue building rival military blocs while insisting that the other side must eventually retreat.

That is not a security architecture. It is an escalation structure.

The case for deterrence

The opposing argument must be stated plainly.

Russia invaded Ukraine and has given neighbouring states compelling reasons to fear its intentions. European weakness could tempt Moscow to test the alliance. If nuclear threats persuade the West to withdraw support from Ukraine, every nuclear power will learn that coercion works.

Rearmament may therefore be the policy most likely to prevent the catastrophe described here.

Governments can also argue that publishing detailed assessments of vulnerable infrastructure, interceptor shortages and possible national responses would assist Russian military planning. Deterrence sometimes requires ambiguity.

These are serious answers. But they do not remove the need for democratic consent.

Nobody is asking governments to publish targeting plans or reveal classified intelligence. Citizens are entitled to an intelligible account of the political objective, the risks of retaliation, the limits of European defences, the likely economic cost, the conditions for negotiation and the means by which conventional war would be prevented from becoming nuclear.

These are not operational secrets. They are the questions upon which informed consent depends.

The debate Europe has avoided

Europeans have been asked whether they support Ukraine, oppose Russian aggression and favour defending their countries. They have not been asked whether European weapons should be used deep inside Russia, what degree of retaliation they are expected to accept or whether their governments are prepared to fight without full American participation.

They have not been told what readiness would require from them personally: higher taxation, reduced public expenditure, industrial mobilisation, disruption to energy and transport, civil defence preparations or the possibility that the infrastructure sustaining ordinary life would become a battlefield.

Nor have they been offered one intelligible description of the settlement Europe seeks. Is the objective to restore every part of Ukraine’s internationally recognised territory? To secure a ceasefire? To defeat Russia militarily? To compel a change of government in Moscow? To bring Ukraine into NATO? Or to construct a new security system in which Ukraine survives outside it?

Without a defined political destination, military escalation becomes a policy that perpetuates itself.

The parallel with 1914 should not be stretched too far. Europe today is not Europe on the eve of the First World War, and alliances do not mechanically produce catastrophe. The enduring warning is simpler.

Governments can believe that their intentions are defensive, assume their adversaries will retreat and still set in motion events they cannot control.

Europe need not accept Moscow’s account of the conflict, abandon Ukraine or dismantle its defences. But it should stop pretending that preparation for war consists only of budgets, factories and readiness targets.

Preparation also means telling the public what may be attacked, what cannot be protected, what Article 5 actually guarantees, how long Europe could withstand economic disruption and how its leaders would prevent a conventional exchange from becoming a nuclear one.

Perhaps Russia will never strike a NATO country. Perhaps stronger European forces will ensure that it does not. But Europe is making decisions whose failure could expose hundreds of millions of people to continental war.

A low probability is not an adequate reassurance when the possible consequence is national destruction.

Before Europe prepares to fight Russia, its citizens are entitled to know what their governments believe that war would mean, what price they will be required to pay and how those governments intend to stop it.