Wargaming Russian Invasion in the Baltics

As peace talks between Russia and Ukraine drag on, a recent wargame reported in the Wall Street Journal by Yaroslav Trofimov highlights a more immediate concern. The wargame was a simulation of an invasion of Lithuania by Russia. I’m going to extract a few telling quotes.

“Our assessment is that Russia will be able to move large amounts of troops within one year,” the Netherlands Defense Minister Ruben Brekelmans said in an interview. “We see that they are already increasing their strategic inventories, and are expanding their presence and assets along the NATO borders.”

Based on the wargame’s result, Russia need only move 15,000 troops to seize and occupy a corridor within Lithuania.

The exercise simulating a Russian incursion into Lithuania, organized in December by Germany’s Die Welt newspaper together with the German Wargaming Center of the Helmut-Schmidt University of the German Armed Forces, became an object of heated conversation within Europe’s security establishment even before the newspaper published its results on Thursday. The exercise involved 16 former senior German and NATO officials, lawmakers and prominent security experts role-playing a scenario set in October 2026.

In the exercise, Russia used the pretext of a humanitarian crisis in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad to seize the Lithuanian city of Marijampole, a key crossroads in the narrow gap between Russia and Belarus. Russian portrayals of the invasion as a humanitarian mission were sufficient for the U.S. to decline invoking NATO’s Article 5 that calls for allied assistance. Germany proved indecisive, and Poland, while mobilizing, didn’t send troops across the border into Lithuania. The German brigade already deployed to Lithuania failed to intervene, in part because Russia used drones to lay mines on roads leading out of its base.

“Deterrence depends not only on capabilities, but on what the enemy believes about our will, and in the wargame my ‘Russian colleagues’ and I knew: Germany will hesitate. And this was enough to win,” said Franz-Stefan Gady, a Vienna-based military analyst who played the Russian chief of general staff.

That is the article’s most important insight.

In real life, Lithuania and other allies would have had enough intelligence warnings to avoid this scenario, said Rear Adm. Giedrius Premeneckas, Lithuania’s chief of defense staff. Even without allies, Lithuania’s own armed forces—17,000 in peacetime and 58,000 after an immediate mobilization—would have been able to deal with a limited threat to Marijampole, he said. Russia itself would have to consider the high stakes involved, he added: “It would be a dilemma for Russia to sustain Kaliningrad, and if Russia starts something, it must be said very clearly by NATO that if you do, you will lose Kaliningrad.”

That is the prescription the article ultimately arrives at.

One caution is in order. Mr. Trofimov asserts that Vladimir Putin has stated an intention to restore Russia’s tsarist glory. That is not accurate. Putin has expressed nostalgia and grievance about Russia’s lost status and the dissolution of the Soviet Union but he has never articulated a program to recreate a tsarist empire. Claims to the contrary are not evidence-based analysis but psychoanalysis and they distract from the far more important issue: not what Putin wants, but what he believes he can do without triggering an effective response.

Russia’s experience in Ukraine also illustrates the limits of its military capabilities. Despite substantial investment and mass mobilization, Russia has struggled to achieve decisive results against a single opponent operating on its own territory with Western support. Those limitations are not speculative; they are now well understood inside the Russian military and political leadership. If anything, they should be more apparent to Mr. Putin than to outside observers. This further undercuts arguments that Russian actions are driven by expansive ideological ambitions rather than by calculations of opportunity, risk, and allied hesitation.

In my opinion our course of action should be

1. We should abandon discussions of percent of GDP in military expenditure and talk about capabilities.

Previous wargame exercises have shown that we need at least one week to field a counter-force. The implications of that are clear. The focus of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, which have been on post-occupation resistance, are inadequate. If a credible counter-force cannot be fielded in under a week, then deterrence exists only on paper.

2. We should produce objective evaluations of the capabilities of our European allies.

I presume we already have. Nonetheless, it bears mentioning. I also presume it’s not the sort of thing that should be announced publicly. All of our European allies should be evaluated in this way. I find the assumption that Germany cannot be depended on very troubling. If Germany cannot be relied upon in the opening phase of a European defense crisis, NATO’s collective defense model collapses into improvisation.

3. A date certain by which our European allies must have the necessary capabilities should be established and communicated with them.

Along with the consequences of failing to meet the “drop dead” date. This would not be coercion, it would be clarity: allies would retain full sovereignty over their choices but not insulation from their consequences.

It may be that NATO has exceeded its sell-by date. If so, that judgment will ultimately be made by events, not declarations.