Adrian Blomfield
September 11, 2025
Smart News
The last time Russia held a major military exercise in Belarus, officials in Minsk and Moscow dismissed Western alarm as hysteria.
The manoeuvres were “purely defensive”, Gen Viktor Gulevich, the Belarusian army’s chief of staff, insisted.
Yet the Zapad 2021 exercises proved a prelude to war. Many of the troops involved returned not to their bases in Siberia or the Urals but massed along the Ukrainian border, invading five months later.
Now, as anxiety along Nato’s Baltic flank turns to alarm in the wake of Wednesday’s drone incursion in Poland, Russian troops are back in Belarus for Zapad 2025, whose main phase begins on Friday.
This time there are no Cassandras in Western intelligence agencies predicting imminent invasion to a disbelieving world. With just 40,000 troops – a fifth of the number Moscow claimed in 2021 – the consensus is that Russia is too bogged down in Ukraine to embark on fresh adventurism.
Even so, nerves are jangling, with the exercises coming just days after Nato fighter jets shot down Russian drones in Poland on Wednesday, the first time alliance fighters have engaged enemy targets over its air space.
European intelligence services warning that Vladimir Putin could be ready to launch a new war, possibly across the Polish border in the Baltics, within five years – and perhaps as soon as two – have therefore taken on a more ominous tone.
In many ways, senior officials in the region argue that war is already under way. Russia is waging sabotage operations against Europe’s undersea infrastructure, a “grey zone” conflict that blurs war and peace. The question is whether Europe, financially stretched, politically divided and still dependent on wavering US support, has the staying power to stop hybrid wars from tipping into open conflict.
Lt Gen Dariusz Parylak, Nato’s commander in Poland and the Baltics, is among those watching Zapad closely. The drills may be unsettling, but they also offer a rare chance to assess Russia’s battlefield thinking.
“We will have a kitchen-window observation on how Russia is transferring lessons from Ukraine to training,” he said on the sidelines of the IISS Prague Defence Summit.
“That’s vital because it shows how their thinking is developing, how modernisation processes are going and the evolution of their tactics, techniques and procedure doctrines.”
For Europe’s commanders, the danger in the Baltic is not theoretical. Russia’s forces are battle-hardened, its manpower problems largely resolved and its defence industry is outproducing Europe in tanks and missiles. Its air and naval power outside the Black Sea remains intact.
And in Putin, who now casts the Ukraine war as an existential struggle with Nato, Russia has a leader increasingly intent on reclaiming Soviet and imperial domains.
Along its 1,400-mile-long border with Finland and the Baltic states, Russia is expanding bases, building barracks, air-defence units and depots. In response to Finland and Sweden’s accession to Nato, Moscow has revived the Soviet-era Leningrad military district and begun flying surveillance blimps along the frontier in a show of intimidation.
Should Putin choose to strike, defence chiefs fear the most likely flashpoint would be the Baltic states, once part of the Soviet Union but now Nato members. Latvia and Estonia, with significant Russian minorities, could provide the Kremlin with a manufactured pretext.
The region also offers an opportunity to test Nato’s Article 5, the alliance’s mutual-defence clause. Failure to mount a unified response could fatally weaken the alliance. Nato has bolstered its presence, but Donald Trump’s ambivalence about Nato – and Washington’s planned cuts in security assistance to front-line states, announced last week – may encourage Putin to gamble.
According to Pål Jonson, Sweden’s defence minister, Russia may not yet be able to wage a continental war in Europe but it could be ready for a regional one within two to five years.
If so, an offensive is likely to begin with an attempt to seize the Suwalki Gap, a narrow stretch of land separating Russia from its heavily militarised exclave of Kaliningrad.
Putin could present such a move as a limited operation to protect Kaliningrad from aggression, hoping to deter a Nato response. Yet seizing the gap would sever the Baltic states from the rest of the alliance.
“Putin believes that if he captures the Suwalki Gap he can not only connect Russia to Kaliningrad Oblast, he can also cut off the Baltic states,” Gen Parylak said.
“His dream of reviving the Soviet empire will have taken a big step forward. It is only 60km-long, which makes it easy to seize if we don’t have enough prepared forces and if we have not prepared our plans adequately.”
The limited nature of this year’s Zapad exercises suggest that such an operation may not be imminent. But while Nato watches the manoeuvres in Belarus for insight into Russia’s evolving doctrine and combat-readiness, the greater danger may lie in the murky “grey zone” of seabed sabotage and pressure on vulnerable Baltic outposts, most notably the Swedish island of Gotland and the Finland’s Åland archipelago.
Control of either could allow Moscow to dominate the Baltic in a war with the West and Russia’s forces have rehearsed seizing both.
After disarming Gotland in the wake of the Cold War – a step Mr Jonson calls “a big strategic mistake” – Sweden has raced to remilitarise it, garrisoning the island, upgrading infrastructure and integrating its Gotland strategy into Nato’s collective defence plans.
“There have also been a lot of international exercises, especially after we became Nato allies as well, that assure we are able to deter and defend and signal our determination to keep Gotland and the rest of Sweden safe,” Mr Jonson said.
Åland, however, is more vulnerable. Finland has been forbidden from stationing troops there since a treaty demilitarised the islands after the Crimean War. Changing that status would mean ripping up two treaties with Moscow, yet leaving them undefended could jeopardise Nato reinforcement and allow Russia to seal the Gulf of Bothnia to maritime traffic.
As Zapad gets under way, Russia’s western neighbours are mounting their own displays of strength. Exercises in Poland involving 30,000 Polish and allied troops are in progress, while Germany is leading maritime drills in the Baltic Sea involving 14 navies and more than 40 warships.
But while Nato’s exercise-for-exercise strategy demonstrates intent, the real test is whether Europe can keep pace with its adversary in the arms race.
There is progress. The Baltic states and their Nordic neighbours are raising defence spending faster than most of the alliance and strengthening their naval presence with new submarines, corvettes and patrol craft.
Yet bureaucratic hurdles and production delays – not just of ships but also of artillery and ammunition – have raised fears that the gap with Russia is not closing quickly enough. Moscow’s defence industry, long on a war footing, continues to outpace Europe’s.
“European defence procurement remains relatively slow,” the International Institute of Strategic Studies, a London-based think tank, warned in a report this month.