What next for Vladimir Putin? Or, maybe, where next?
Bogged down in the Donbas, humiliated by Ukraine’s cross-border incursion into the Kursk region, the Russian strongman faces the clearest threat to his authority since last year’s abortive Wagner revolt.
And with his back against the wall, Putin is at his most dangerous, according to critics who describe his “street thug” mentality. The fear is that the Moscow bully could double down on his Ukraine gamble by making war on another front, taking on NATO in the Baltic states.
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Signs that Putin no longer has any limits have been have been building for some time. A direct cruise missile attack on Kyiv’s main children’s hospital last month, on the eve of a NATO summit in Washington, D.C., was seen as a message from the Kremlin that this is not just about Ukraine, that Russia is ready for bigger battles, even for World War III.
In Russia itself at least, the message got through. The strong words and decisive resolutions from NATO leaders in D.C. were met with mockery, ugly jokes about the increasingly tiny part left of war-ravished Ukraine that would eventually become a NATO member, and apparently serious calls from the Kremlin for all of Ukraine to be conquered. Pro-war Russian bloggers, military officers, and TV talk show guests worked themselves into a frenzy of excitement. Anything was possible; no red lines could stop them now, not with their nuclear weapons.
The focus soon turned from Ukraine to the three Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—and a discussion of which should be attacked first and how many troops it would take to do the job. The three former Soviet republics have been NATO members since 2004, but Putin and his allies don’t believe any Western powers would be willing to shed blood in their defense. They see this as NATO’s weakest link—if World War III is coming, this is where it could start. “It is unlikely Estonia’s allies would join them in two days,” suggested the popular NeoficialiyBeZsonov channel about a potential attack from the Russian Baltic port city of Kaliningrad. The Moscow Times reported that Russian elites were “preparing for WWIII, discussing how it would end.”
The press and social media hysteria was monitored for The Daily Beast by the Massachusetts-based data analytics company FilterLabs. “The pro-war Z talking heads turn ‘important’ NATO documents and articles about NATO’s readiness into ‘revealing’ facts illustrating how much the Atlantic alliance is not ready for ‘our decisive attack,’” FilterLabs research analyst Vasily Gatov told The Daily Beast. “This topic is constantly present on their channels. Eventually, these speculations, processed by pro-Russian powers in the Baltic states, are turned into Russia’s alleged plans to attack the Estonian city of Narva on a certain date in November 2024.”
For some in the West, talk of a World War III pitting Russia against NATO is fanciful. NATO’s military power—in terms of numbers of tanks, planes, artillery—is at least four times greater than Russia’s, they point out. Its military budget is five times bigger. And Russian generals bragged before the February 2022 invasion that they could take Kyiv in two days, only to find themselves two years later bogged down in an interminable conflict that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
None of that matters to Putin and his stooges, however. All they care about is whether their enemies will stand up to them. “Russia is talking about attacking the Baltic states just because they can,” former Russian Parliament member Gennady Gudkov told The Daily Beast. “They don’t see any of the red lines, so they will continue the cyber-attacks on the Baltic states this year, send drones to Romania, or more missiles to fly over Poland.”
“To understand Russia you have to accept the fact that Putin’s mentality is that of a street thug, he is afraid of only one thing, of dying,” Gudkov adds. “When Putin looks at NATO, he does not see power. He sees that after two and a half years of war one NATO state leader, Viktor Orbán, comes to see him in the Kremlin and the leader of another NATO state, Bulgarian President Rumen Radev, refuses even to attend the NATO summit.”
And what seemed like a crazy plan when it was first reported on Russian TV in January 2022, to use the Swedish island of Gotland as a staging post for Russian attacks on the Baltic states, is now seen as a real threat. Since the invasion of Ukraine, both Finland and Sweden have joined NATO. Gotland is now a strategically vital NATO asset in the middle of what some experts now jokingly call ‘NATO’s lake.’
NATO’s northern members are right to be alarmed. The first part of Russia’s theoretical scenario, cyber-attacks on the Baltic states, has been implemented: Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania have all reported such attacks. The next step in the alleged scenario for the attack is meant to be an attempt by Russia to stir unrest among the significant Russian-speaking, pro-Moscow populations in Latvia and Lithuania, starting this month. “There are quite a few so-called ‘vatniki’ in Lithuania, who had worked for Soviet factories, and although there is no Russian television here they watch Russian propaganda on Youtube and on Telegram social media,” Pavel Marinich, the founder of Vilnius-based Malanka Media, told The Daily Beast.
“People talk about Russia’s threat but everybody also understands that Russia has never experienced NATO’s power and its newest battlefield technologies. Its intelligence watches the Russian military in Kaliningrad day and night. Russian troops would not pass the Suwalki Gap,” he added, referring to the strategic corridor between Poland and Lithuania where any Russian force would have to pass.
For some, given Russia’s problems in Ukraine, the threat to NATO members still appear remote. But those in the region know that, street thug or not, Putin has a record of actually doing what he says he is going to do, even if he takes his time. He banned Georgian restaurants in Moscow, then deported Georgians, then attacked and occupied Georgian territories. He promised the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad he would help him keep “sovereignty,” and did so. He harassed Ukrainians, tortured them in Crimea, annexed a bunch of territories and then compared Ukraine to a sleeping beauty with a line from a song about a rape: “Like it or don’t like it, it’s your duty my beauty.”
In the past two years, Putin’s forces have laid waste to dozens of Ukrainian towns and villages, killing or wounding about 100,000 Ukrainians and destroying key infrastructure. And with help from China and buoyed by oil and gas sales, there seems to be more money in Russia than at any point during the war. Putin’s game plan is clear, using the threat of future escalation to get the West to come to him and propose talks that will bury his crimes and cement his gains. If not, and the U.S. continues to send long-range missiles to Ukraine, he could take the fight to NATO. “Europe’s capitals are potential victims,” his spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
