By Sam Jones

Financial Times

June 30, 2016 12:05 pm

As Nato leaders prepare to meet in Warsaw, thousands of troops are engaged in large-scale military exercises on both sides of Russia’s border with Europe. Sam Jones reports.

US troops fire a M777 Howitzer during combat rehearsals for the

"Saber Strike" exercise in Tapa, Estonia last month. Photo: Andrejs Strokins

Deep in a birch forest on a hot May morning, our rattling 4x4 comes to a crunching halt, a small cloud of sandy dust rising around it as we step out. It takes a few moments - and a quick check of our GPS tracker - to make sure we’re in the right place. Off the path, to the right, obscured in the undergrowth, branches pulled across its roof and sides, is another vehicle. We walk around it, and rap on the doors at the back.

Colonel Eero Rebo, 42, leans out from the dim interior in which half a dozen other Estonian ­soldiers crouch around radio sets and the faint blue glow of LCD screens. The colonel’s face is thick with camouflage paint. He swings his legs forward and jumps down with a heavy thud to the ground. We walk a little way into the forest.

“They will use their armour to try and break through this afternoon,” he says, sketching out the outline of his battleplan somewhat warily as he eyes the smartphone I am using to record our conversation (but which provides an easy target for signals intelligence). “And I will use the terrain - the rivers, the forests - to stop them. I will get them into areas where they are weak but I am strong.”

There is the modulating roar of a jet engine ­overhead. Col Rebo walks backwards, eyes up, cracking through the bilberries and heather into the cover of the wood and pulling us with him. The plane is a Portuguese F-16, which with its sensor array is trying to pick up the location of the command post. Closer to earth, the air is prickly with dozens of mosquitoes.

“Estonia is a small country,” Col Rebo continues. “But we are stronger than many people think. This is the actual land. This is where I will fight, and where my enemies will die. I know every bridge, every river. I know what is needed to stop the Russians.”

Some 5,000 Estonians, most of them young conscripts, have spent most of the past few months training for war with Russia. They are not alone. Nato, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation founded in 1949, has supported Kevadtorm (“Spring Storm”), the exercise that has been taking place in the ­woodlands and lowlands along the edge of Estonia’s Russian border. Around 1,000 troops from Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and the US, as well as the Portuguese with their ­fighters, have been deployed to Estonia to train too, and play the enemy.

Across the Baltic, other exercises have been organised under the alliance’s aegis. In April, Latvia held “Summer Shield” with 1,100 troops. As Kevadtorm wrapped up, Lithuania began “Iron Wolf”, with 5,000 troops. In June, “Saber Strike” saw thousands of US troops airlifted into the entire region. And elsewhere in Europe even bigger drills have happened. In Poland, “Anakonda”, a 31,000-man war game - the largest deployment of foreign troops on Polish soil since the second world war - closed a few weeks ago.

Jens Stoltenberg, a Norwegian politician, 13th Secretary-

general of Nato: “Nato does not seek confrontation with Russia”

There is not just a quantitative difference to these exercises compared with the past 20 years of military quietude in Europe, but a qualitative one, too. Europe’s militaries are once again training in earnest for war in their own backyard. Generations of soldiers who were trained to fight insurgencies in far-flung corners of the globe are now learning how to defend their native towns and cities.

For its part, the Kremlin is showing no signs of slowing down its own remilitarisation. Between June and October, Russia will hold more than 2,000 exercises and wargames, its defence minister Sergei Shoigu told Russian reporters last month. Even more worrying for Nato will be the snap drills planned in the same period: rapid mobilisation exercises that could see tens of thousands of troops (one in 2015, for example, involved 80,000 soldiers and 12,000 vehicles) deploying on the borders of the alliance - close to the Baltic states, in Russia’s western military zone.

Western defence chiefs, intelligence agencies, diplomats and their political masters are worried by — and unsure exactly how to respond to - a newly muscular Russian military machine, happily wielded as a tool of first resort by a revanchist Kremlin. Perhaps even more worryingly, there seems to be a widening gulf between what the west’s security technocrats are fearful of and preparing for, and what the public at large understands about the threat Russia may - or may not - pose.

AH-64 Apache helicopters during rehearsals for Saber Strike

In a week’s time, behind half a dozen layers of security fencing and military cordons, protected by thousands of troops on the ground, jets in the air and one of Europe’s biggest ever counter-espionage operations, the political leaders of the west will meet in a giant white tent in the middle of Warsaw’s national stadium for Nato’s biennial summit, the alliance’s principal ­decision-making gathering.

The future of European security has never been more delicately held in balance. The continent is beset by fragile or crumbling states on its borders, while internally it is racked by growing political discontent and economic stagnation. Britain’s decision to withdraw from the EU, just 10 days ago, is a seismic event. The more political ­division there is in Europe, many of Nato’s top ­strategists believe, the more Russia, in particular, has to gain. Russia’s geopolitical vision, says one western Kremlinologist — a senior Nato intelligence official — is to fragment Nato, permanently diminish US and UK influence in Europe and bring the ­continent into its political and economic orbit.

At the time of the 2014 summit, which took place at a golf-course resort in Newport, Wales, Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the covert war in eastern Ukraine was just months old. A hasty though ambitious package of measures was agreed to shift the alliance’s posture in Europe. Warsaw will make that shift complete. “Nato does not seek confrontation with Russia,” says Jens Stoltenberg, Norway’s former prime ­ minister and now, as secretary-general, Nato’s - civilian chief. “What we do is proportionate, it’s defensive and it’s fully in line with our international obligations.” Those obligations include a host of post-cold-war treaties with Russia - such as the 1990 treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe, the Nato-Russia Founding Act of 1997 and the Vienna Document, last renewed in 2011 - that proscribe military deployments in Europe and its borders with Russia in order to avoid their dangerous remilitarisation.

“The cold war is history and we want it to remain history,” Stoltenberg says, as we take coffee in his office in Brussels. Outside, cranes are preparing to move the Nato star - the hulking steel sculpture of the organisation’s symbol - from its current place in the old HQ’s cour d’honneur to the vast new glass Nato campus, the future HQ, across the road.

Caught by both a need to redress its military weakness in the east (Nato has never had permanent forces of alliance troops based beyond Germany) and by the risk of aggravating Russia ­further and with it the prospect of actual conflict, the alliance is struggling to articulate just what the nature of its current stand-off with Russia is.

US soldiers fire a Javelin anti-tank missile during

rehearsals for Saber Strike. Photo: Andrejs Strokins

“We are not in the cold war but neither are we in the strategic partnership we tried to establish at the end of it. So we are in a new situation,” Stoltenberg continues. “We are in a landscape where we have never been before.” And yet, as he goes on to emphasise, the alliance is dusting off many of the same strategic plans — from how to stop Russia’s huge tank battalions as they roll across Europe’s flatlands to the circumstances under which a ­retaliatory nuclear strike could be envisaged - that were last seen in the 1980s, and at least drawing lessons from them, if not replicating them exactly.

The Warsaw summit will see Nato undergo, Stoltenberg says, “the biggest adaptation ... the biggest enforcement of our collective defence” since the cold war came to an end. But, despite this confident claim, the alliance’s political unity is being challenged by an increasingly striking divergence of views within it. Eastern European members have an almost visceral fear of the Kremlin’s intentions: southern European members are preoccupied by the Mediterranean migrant crisis; the US and UK share bleak assessments of Vladimir Putin’s motivations and the degree to which he is now trapped on a path of growing belligerence by circumstances of his own making; meanwhile Germany, whose diplomats are known to have the closest ties to the Russian government, fears that Nato is entering into a wildly irresponsible game of military bluff.

Last month, as US troops began their parachute drops into the east for Saber Strike, German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier decried the entire exercise as a “disastrous” piece of “sabre­rattling”, a “war cry”. If his language - aimed squarely at Washington DC - was unusually undiplomatic, it is perhaps because, in Germany and beyond, fears of the current situation spiralling out of control are so high. Nato’s pivot back to the plains and forests of eastern Europe has certainly been swift.

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Ever since the Balkan conflict of the late 1990s and the 9/11 terror attacks in New York, Nato’s unofficial mantra - repeated countless times inside the alliance - was “out of area or out of business”, a stance predicated on the notion that there was nothing left in Europe or the North Atlantic for Nato to worry about.

Nato spent most of the 1990s ­managing down the size of its military activities on the continent: old tripwire lines were dismantled; troops were sent home to their bases and plans for full-scale ground wars were rolled up. Following 2001, alliance members spent most of the next decade retooling their militaries for deployment thousands of miles away in Afghanistan and Iraq. The focus became fighting counter-insurgencies, not states. As then secretary-­general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said in 2006: “[We] have broadened our strategic horizon far beyond Europe, and tackling terrorism, engaging it at source, is now a main mission.” By 2010 all 28 Nato states had troops in Afghanistan - 120,000 in all.

“Russia defines Nato as a threat. It is written in their doctrine” - Lt Gen Riho Terras, Estonia’s military chief.

It was as if a blind eye had been turned to Russia’s huge military modernisation programme - including a planned spend of 20 trillion roubles on cutting-edge equipment between now and 2020. At Nato’s Lisbon summit in 2010, dialogue, even partnership, with the Kremlin was still a seriously discussed agenda item. The fiery jeremiad against Nato and Washington delivered by President Putin in Munich in 2007, as well as Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia, seemed not to have been taken as serious causes for concern.

The 2013 invasion of Ukraine, however, provided a dramatic wake-up call. And Russia’s military budget is still growing. It was $70bn in 2013; by 2016, defence analysts IHS Jane’s predict it to have risen to $100bn. Indeed, even as Russia’s economy suffers, many Russia analysts see the military, and its use in reinforcing growing nationalist­sentiment, becoming more and more important to Putin’s grip on power.

Nato’s response to Russia’s Ukrainian operation has so far centred around three key elements, decided at the Wales summit. First, the creation of a “Very High Readiness Joint Task Force” [VJTF], known also as the “spearhead”, a brigade of 5,000 troops capable of being deployed to deal with crisis situations within 48 hours. Second, the doubling in size of Nato’s existing response force, to 40,000 troops. And third, a package of measures to “reassure” eastern European states by ramping up war-gaming, and bolstering Nato’s presence in their territories, including the establishment of forward staging posts known as “Nato Force Integration Units”, which would smooth the deployment of the VJTF in their areas of responsibility, should it ever be called on.

The 2014 Welsh summit focused on boosting Nato’s responsiveness but it skirted around the issue of actually permanently placing more troops in eastern Europe. Nato’s eastern members pushed for such measures but dovish voices in the alliance believed these would be too provocative at the time. Nato, they argued, should maintain the moral high ground and keep the international promises it had made. The 1997 Nato-Russia Founding Act - a document that commits both Moscow and the alliance to “lasting and inclusive peace” in Europe - stipulates: “Nato reiterates that in the current and foreseeable security environment, the alliance will carry out its collective defence and other missions by ensuring the necessary interoperability, integration and capability for reinforcement rather than by additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces.”

Purple smoke indicates the location of troops during combat rehearsals.

Photo: Andrejs Strokins

In Warsaw, the interpretation of that clause is set to be stretched. The summit will endorse a decision taken last month by Nato’s defence ministers in Brussels for 3,000 to 4,000 Nato troops, in four battalions - one American, one British, one Canadian and one German - to be stationed in the three Baltic states and Poland on a “persistent” basis. Nato officials argue that this still falls short of the “substantial” threshold defined in the 1997 Founding Act. The point, they say, is to create deterrent “tripwires” - sufficient troop deployments to make a Russian decision to interfere in those countries fraught with the risk of rapid escalation.

“We have to think beyond Wales,” says Poland’s foreign minister, Witold Waszczykowski. “The political and military situation has not improved. The measures taken in Wales are not enough to provide security. The decisions in Warsaw will have to take a harder stance. This is an existential threat for the Baltic countries… the time of peace is over.”

Russia’s military has a quite different reading of Nato’s recent military history. In May 2014, Valery Gerasimov, chief of the Russian general staff, speaking at the Moscow International Security Conference, gave a detailed presentation on what he described as the west’s developing doctrine of “colour revolutions”. Nato’s reinforcement of the Baltic states and Poland, he concluded, was part of a grander game to expand aggressively the alliance’s influence in Ukraine and, by implication, Russia itself. Gen Gerasimov’s analysis — which now dominates military thinking in the Kremlin — takes its cues from a deeply entrenched narrative within Russia’s security elites over Nato and the west.

According to this, with the fall of the Soviet Union at the hands of the US, the western military complex began to seek ways to subjugate other parts of the world to its economic and political will. In successive conflicts after 1990, Nato and its biggest military powers refined a military formula of “regime change” to topple or destabilise governments that did not bend to western economic and democratic values. In this vision, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and the Arab Spring were part of a continuum. As were the Rose revolution in Georgia (2003), the Orange revolution in Ukraine (2004), the green movement in Iran (2009) and most recently of all, the Syrian civil war.

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Latvian soldiers taking part in the Tapa exercise.

Photo: Andrejs Strokins

“We’re still in a state of denial… We’re not in a cold war but we are in an entirely new paradigm that we have to be realistic about,” says General Sir Richard Shirreff, who until 2014 was the deputy supreme allied commander of Nato’s forces in Europe. “What Putin is seeing is political weakness. . . countries across Europe assuming peace will go on regardless without being prepared to do what Nato was ­prepared to do in the cold war. The whole concept of deterrence then was well thought out. . . Now, our efforts are rather lame.”

Gen Shirreff’s new book, War with Russia - a work of fiction intended to cleave as closely as possible to political reality - leaves little to doubt when it comes to the general’s rather bleak assessment of the current stand-off with Russia and the direction it is taking us. The only answer, he says, is a dramatic reinforcement of Nato’s eastern flank. “[The Russians] despise weakness. Where they see weakness they will keep probing like it’s the centre of a marshmallow. We shouldn’t under any circumstances be ruling out dialogue. But to have proper dialogue we need to have credible deterrence.”

The publicity around War with Russia has generated heat of its own. In Brussels in May for a Nato meeting, Britain’s foreign secretary Philip Hammond upbraided Gen Shirreff for “disturbing” conduct and dismissed the book as little more than a potboiler: “I don’t think there is anybody serious around who thinks that the kind of scenario he is posturing is remotely likely.” (The foreign secretary has a longstanding animus with Gen Shirreff: in 2014, while Hammond was the UK’s minister of defence, Gen Shirreff slammed his plans for defence cuts.)

Hammond is hardly known for being soft on Russia. (Indeed, a senior German diplomat decries the UK’s “incessant” hawkishness whenever the Russian problem rears its head among the top table of Europe’s leaders.) However, by his reckoning the Warsaw summit looks set to strike an appropriate balance. “These are defensive moves . . . We want to deploy on a scale that in total adds up to a brigade [4,000 to 5,000 men]. Anything smaller wouldn’t be enough, anything much bigger would be capable of being misinterpreted as an aggressive action.”

Richard Shirreff, Former Nato deputy supreme allied commander,

Europe: “Where the Russians see weakness they will keep probing

like it’s the centre of a marshmallow". Photo: Getty

All the same - in the dozens of interviews conducted for this article, both on and off the record, with serving senior military officials within the alliance as well as civilian diplomats and intelligence officials - it is Gen Shirreff’s more pessimistic assessment that chimes most with the current military orthodoxy in Nato. “We don’t have the structures for peacetime any more,” says Lieutenant General Jonas Vytautas Zukas, Lithuania’s military chief. “We are creating the structures for wartime.”

Lithuania reintroduced conscription last year. Its defence budget rose 30 per cent in 2015, and will rise a similar amount in 2016. The country’s entire military is being reinvigorated and reformed. In the Baltics, on Russia’s doorstep, and in the shadow of a long and bloody history, the threat is felt most acutely. But it is no longer a purely local paranoia. “You see things quite differently from here,” says Colonel Jakob Sogard Larsen, the Danish commander of Nato’s “integration unit” in Lithuania. “Nato’s [increased presence] here has opened a lot of minds. What you see is that Russia is unpredictable and it is not transparent. People here are afraid ... For Nato, that means we need to relearn and rethink total war. Was the first world war predictable? Was the second world war predictable?”

The point, says Col Larsen, is to create deterrence measures that stop wars from ever happening in the first place. And that requires credibility.

According to one senior US Pentagon official, the issue that is most concerning is not that of Russia simply rolling out columns of tanks across the Baltics in an overt land grab. The fear among many in western intelligence agencies and defence ministries is that Russia may miscalculate. The Kremlin’s military doctrine — which for the past few years has focused on plans to undermine and provoke Nato at a level carefully calibrated to be just below the alliance’s Article 5 threshold, the all-for-one-and-one-for-all clause that triggers outright war - may backfire by encouraging an action that Nato no longer believes it can tolerate.

On a recent trip to Warsaw, I had dinner with a Polish intelligence official who outlined a nightmare scenario. Imagine a destabilising, anonymous cyber attack on Estonia (the entire country depends on a single digital identification and governance system known as the X-Road, which gives citizens a digital passport used for everything from voting to healthcare and banking), coincident with occasional rioting by agents provocateurs and a massive increase in propagandising from Russian TV channels (watched by around a sixth of the Estonian population). Amid an increase in lawlessness, or perhaps orchestrated attacks on ethnic Russians (a quarter of Estonia’s population) by undercover Russian special forces, Russia declares a temporary “peacekeeping” mission to create a tiny buffer zone around the ethnically Russian border city of Narva, in Estonia’s east. It’s then left to Nato to respond: does it go to war with Russia over such a trivial intervention? Or hold back, and in doing so fatally undermine the confidence of its eastern members in its credibility? For Russia, my Polish interlocutor says, the entire object is to destroy Nato’s credibility. Grabbing land in the Baltics is entirely incidental.

Such scenarios are not just pipe-dreams. Whenever Russia conducts big military drills close to Estonia’s border, one senior Estonian security official told me on a recent visit to Tallinn, the country suffers from a significant increase in attempted cyber attacks from Moscow. It is unclear whether such activity is just intended to frighten Estonia or whether it has genuine destructive intent, he said. “But perhaps that is the point.”

In the past few months, all the Baltic states have been tasked by Nato with writing up detailed hypotheticals and passing them on to the alliance’s high command so planners there can calibrate responses.

War with Russia, says Lieutenant General Riho Terras, chief of Estonia’s military, is impossible to predict. But such a conclusion should be a cause for prudence and concern, not complacency. “We are very bad at analysing or predicting intent. We failed to do it when Russia invaded Georgia [in 2008]. We failed to do it in Ukraine [in 2014]. We failed again when Russia sent troops to Syria [2015],” says Gen Terras. “The wake-up call was snoozed after Georgia. We slept and that was not good. Russia hasn’t changed since then. They define Nato as a threat, it is literally written in their doctrine.”

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Russia’s common refrain is that its borderland military build-up is a response to Nato’s own growing military presence. But Nato’s regional presence pales into insignificance compared to Russia’s might. In February, the Rand Corporation, a think-tank funded by the US government and others, published an extensive assessment of the Baltic military situation. Based on hundreds of simulated conflicts, its conclusions were, as the report’s authors stated, “unambiguous”. With its current forces, “Nato cannot successfully defend the territory of its most exposed members.” Even the most benign outcomes for the alliance saw Russian forces seizing Riga, Vilnius or Tallinn within a maximum of 60 hours and involved “catastrophic” defeat of Nato forces.

The Rand study is based on open-source information about Russian and Nato troop deployments. So I asked a senior German general, who has an intimate knowledge of Nato’s logistical and strategic planning, whether the report in any way reflected Nato’s own classified assumptions. The outcomes differ slightly, he said, but Rand’s conclusions were “essentially the same” as the military committee’s own. Nato was undoubtedly strategically mightier than Russia, he said - but on a tactical, regional level, Russia would likely overrun the alliance in the east with relative ease.

Geography is not on Nato’s side when it comes to defending and deterring Russia in eastern Europe. “The Baltic states are like an island,” notes Gen Terras of Estonia. “The gap between Belarus [avowedly pro-Moscow] and Kaliningrad [Russia’s heavily militarised Baltic Sea enclave] is fairly small. There’s one rail and two roads going through it.”

This is the Suwalki gap - a geographical conundrum that Nato strategists talk of in the same way that Germany’s Fulda gap (the hard-to-defend stretch of land Soviet tanks could easily roll across) was spoken of in the cold-war era. It would be easy, Gen Terras notes, for Russia to roll across it and sever the three Nato states north of it - Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia - from the rest of the alliance.

An A-10 Thunderbolt II over Tapa, Estonia, in June

Photo: Andrejs Strokins

Putting three battalions of Nato troops north of the gap, as the Warsaw summit will authorise, is one response to this: in doing so, Nato is upping the stakes and making it harder for Russia to calibrate an attack that would not escalate into all-out war. (Russia, many in Nato’s military hierarchy believe, would not be able to endure a protracted conflict, and so will seek only to engineer a shorter, finite, tactical one.) “Tripwires” aren’t enough, according to several of the senior officials interviewed for this article. Russia needs to be deterred not with symbolic measures but with fully fleshed-out forces capable of repelling whatever is thrown at them.

Part of their concern is occasioned by the scale of the challenge Nato is already wrestling with as a result of its Wales declarations - and the limitations of those measures. For example: Nato’s brand new VJTF - the spearhead rapid reaction brigade - could be unusable if Russia acted fast and decisively enough. One general involved in the logistical planning for the VJTF says it would be unable to deploy “east of the Oder” in the event of outright war. It would simply be too vulnerable during its transit and deployment. And in circumstances where it could be deployed - referred to as “Article 4” situations, where a state requests assistance as a result of a rapidly deteriorating security situation - there are still significant frictions.

A senior officer at the Szczecin headquarters of the Multinational Corps Northeast, Nato’s newly beefed-up command centre in eastern Europe, lists a series of logistical difficulties. Back in the cold war, the West German government had thousands of flat-bed railcars at its disposal to move military assets around, for example. “Right now we have around a hundred. We used to say we need [to keep] 2,000 railcars free. Now just having 20 on standby costs so much.” Private-sector ownership of infrastructure across Europe — a relative rarity 40 years ago - means Nato now has to deal with a bewildering array of interlocutors to shift even the most modest number of tanks around the continent. Military movement in the former Warsaw Pact states that are now Nato members has extra problems: most of the military facilities there are still geared to Soviet, not western, needs. For example, airports originally built for MiG21 fighter planes, with their long runways, seemed ideal for Nato to land hulking C-130 transport planes on to practice moving around the VJTF. But what the runways had in length they lacked in width: you can’t easily turn a C-130 around on a MiG21 runway, let alone quickly unload it.

Jonas Vytautas Zukas, Lithuanian chief of defence. Getty Image.

"We are creating the structures for wartime": Jonas Vytautas Zukas, Lithuanian chief of defence.

Some problems are banal to the point of absurdity: military vehicles do not comply with some countries’ exhaust emission rules. Special permits taking weeks to sign off have to be applied for before each exercise. The VJTF is supposed to deploy in no more than 48 hours but the truck drivers transporting its tanks and artillery still need to take their EU-mandated minimum sleeping hours.

Solutions, slowly, are being found. Nato cryptographers, for example, have built a new device to encrypt military communications so that they can be sent over regular communication networks (what the military refers to as the “dirty” internet), allowing the alliance to communicate rapidly and easily without having to revert to the creaking, older and vulnerable hardware systems used by less advanced members. Deutsche Bahn, meanwhile, has been contracted to iron out the logistical bumps for rail deployments. The German railway company oversaw deployments in Poland in May and June.

A year ago, it took Nato 30 days on average to get the right clearances in place to move troops around Europe. Now, says one of the alliance’s military logistical chiefs, it takes an average of five. It’s still far short of the promised 48 hours, however.

Negotiating with Russia but from a position of strength, says Stoltenberg, is the course Nato needs to take. Every time I have met the secretary-general, he has offered the same example: when he was prime minister of Norway, a small country, he was able to deal with Russia on equal terms on many issues - from border control to fishing rights - precisely because of Norway’s Nato membership, not in spite of it. Being part of a powerful alliance did not make Moscow treat Norway with contempt but with respect.

“People are afraid. For Nato that means we need to rethink total war” - Col Jakob Sogard Larsen, Danish Nato commander.

Whether Russia views Nato’s reinforcements as credible or not remains to be seen. So far the promised deployment of four battalions in the east has only been met with fiery speeches. Nato’s reinforcement is a “threat to national security”, declared Putin in January. Russia will take “retaliatory measures”, Andrei Kelin, a senior foreign ministry diplomat, warned in May. Hawks in Nato, meanwhile, say Russia’s bluster is little more than a cynical pretext for the aggressive militarisation project it intended to undertake anyway.

“Our approach is not to depend on the rhetoric from Russia,” says Stoltenberg. “It is dependent on what we see they are actually doing.”

So far, he says, what Nato sees is not encouraging. “We see a more assertive Russia. We see a Russia which has significantly built up its military forces over many years - modernised those forces. They are exercising those forces. They have increased their presence in the Barents Sea, in the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea and in Syria and the eastern Mediterranean. They have used military force to change borders in Europe, illegally annexing Crimea and destabilising eastern Ukraine.

“It’s in both Nato’s and Russia’s interests to avoid increased tensions, escalation and even more difficult security challenges in Europe,” Stoltenberg adds. At the very least, the old communication channels and protocols - the hotlines of the cold war - need to be revived, he muses. “Miscalculations… misunderstandings … Right now, these incidents could create really dangerous situations.”

Sam Jones

Sam Jones is the Financial Times’ defence and security editor, leading the FT’s coverage on global defence issues, intelligence, cyber warfare and terrorism. He has been with the newspaper since 2007, when he joined as one of the founding writers on FT Alphaville, the markets and finance blog. He has also written for the paper extensively on markets, and on global finance as the paper’s hedge fund correspondent.

He was highly commended as Young Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards in 2009 for investigative work into the rating agencies and their role in the financial crisis. He has also been recognised as a promising journalist by the Harold Wincott Awards and in 2012 was listed as one of MHP’s top 30 journalists to watch.

Prior to joining the FT, he was a reporter with Euromoney. He is a graduate of the London School of Economics, from where he has a first class honours degree in history. (From Financial Times).

Photographs by Andrejs Strokins.

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