Russia already compared Crimea to Greenland: the first of six wins for Putin

Washington has presented Moscow with another huge gift: a NATO alliance at war with itself over Greenland.

Days after Russian leader Vladimir Putin rejected the last gift — a massively generous “peace deal” that’d throw Ukraine under the bus — his American counterpart Donald Trump came back with a replacement, like a thoughtful friend might do. 

Enter Greenland. The Trump administration seems hell-bent on annexing the icy landmass. Trump has slapped 10% tariffs on eight NATO allies who deployed troops to defend the Danish territory, threatened 25% by June, and sent a letter to Norway's prime minister saying he no longer feels obligated to "think purely of peace" after being denied a Nobel Prize. Europe is pushing back. But the cracks are showing.

“I think that thee Russians can’t believe their luck,” Leo Litra, a European Council on Foreign Relations fellow, told Euromaidan Press. “They've been dreaming about a split in NATO between Europe and the US for so long.” 

There are six ways in which Washington’s posture is a godsend for Russia: 

Some observers see a silver lining: that Washington’s belligerence may finally shock European states out of complacency — force them to come together as a military power, one strong enough to check Russia’s ambitions. 

Others are less sanguine, pointing to the continued disunity among the European states, and the lack of political will within them. 

1. NATO’s fracture

Concerted effort from Europe and North America weakened Russia. Sweeping and targeted sanctions put pressure on Russia’s economy and resource availability. This translated directly and indirectly to the battlefield. 

But this pressure depends on willingness to enforce, which in turn depends on unity and trust. And the discord over Greenland and tariffs “torpedoes” trust in the Euro-Atlantic relationship, said Keir Giles, a UK expert on Russia. 

Even if the Greenland situation blows over, it doesn’t change the underlying trend: the US steadily withdrawing from European security. The reduction of support for NATO centers of excellence is just one more sign of things to come. 

Without unity, sanctions enforcement may loosen, giving Russia's economy room to recover. Intelligence sharing, already cut in 2025, could thin even further.

“Even if Trump backs down, his threats risk undercutting trust and severely complicating collective defence within NATO,” said Kristen Harkness, Director of the Institute for the Study of War and Strategy at the University of St. Andrews.

“Europe has to think very carefully about whether and how to share intelligence and plan joint military operations with an ally that, at best, uses interdependence for leverage.” 

“The Greenland issue fundamentally challenges Europe’s strategic positioning which has always relied on American power and capabilities.”

2. Europe’s divided attention

Europe has been slow to react to the threat of Russia, assured that Moscow isn’t a threat while tied down in Ukraine. Some European states have just recently started to wake up. Some are indifferent. Some have a pro-Russian streak. 

If it took this much attention and will to get their act together before, it could become even harder for Europeans to face Russia together, when they have to constantly look over their shoulder for a star-spangled dagger in the back. 

“Most important is the intellectual and planning effort that defending Greenland in an allied operation demands,” said Glen Grant, a retired UK military officer who advised Ukraine.

“There are only so many operational planners and they cannot be everywhere. I have been one, so I know it well.” 

“This takes their eyes off the Ukraine ball, and frankly will drain them physically and emotionally for some time.” 

Hanna Shelest, a security expert at Ukraine’s Foreign Policy Council, thinks that Ukraine and Greenland are absolutely different situations that draw on different resources, but also said the biggest concern is for “the attention of our European partners.” 

Harkness summed it up: “If European governments are scrambling to develop a response to Trump’s tariffs, they have less bandwidth to coordinate their support for Ukraine or devise a collective strategy to protect undersea critical infrastructure, for example.”

3. Weapon availability

Then, there’s the issue of weapons, which Ukraine needs to defend its cities and hold the front. Air attacks already make people sit for 24 hours without power or heat in -15°C frosts. Artillery units sometimes have to make do with three shells per day.

Litra said the NATO fracture may hit the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL), a program that replaced direct American arms donations to Ukraine, which requires European allies to pay for them. 

“These are capabilities which are not matched by anyone else in the world: interceptors for Patriots or HIMARS ammunition or anything else, which nobody else can offer,” Litra said.

“With this happening in Greenland, I'm pretty much certain that European states will not commit new funds for this initiative because it would be insane to fund the American defense industry while the US is threatening to annex part of its territory.” 

Washington can even go further and refuse to deliver weapons that allies have already paid for, something it has already done with non-allied states in the past. 

Not everyone agrees. Harkness said that the US wouldn’t want to lose the income from weapon sales, while Europe cannot wean itself from American weapons overnight. Giles believes existing programs will continue “on autopilot.” 

But both acknowledged that the Trump administration is too unpredictable to know for sure.

4. Conquest legitimized

Trump’s “doctrine” of regional hegemony by the biggest kid on that particular block went some of the way towards legitimizing Russia’s invasion. The recent Venezuela operation and Greenland ambitions take this even farther. 

This will further complicate Ukraine's attempts to rebuke international recognition of Russia's landgrabs. 

Russia is already exploiting the rift to justify its earlier seizures, Oleksandr Kraiev of Ukrainian think tank Prism told Euromaidan Press. The Kremlin line: there’s no united West, just America puppetting Europe. 

“We do see some kind of reinstatement of this myth, and we do see that the European countries, unfortunately, can't provide evidence” to the contrary, he said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said that temporarily occupied Crimea is "no less important for Russia's security" than Greenland is for the United States, adding that Greenland “is not a natural part of Denmark.”

5. Russia’s opportunity 

All this opens up a window of opportunity for Russia to do as much as it can in Ukraine, while also ramping up hostile activity in Europe. Russia needs a break soon, Litra said, but the break has to be on their terms. 

“I think [Ukraine] will be a priority,” he said. “We've been seeing that Russia is trying to take Ukraine offline with the electricity and so on. And if Ukraine is not going to have enough interceptors including from the US then this is quite likely to happen.”

Russia also has a chance to scale up hybrid attacks in Europe, like deniable drone activity, sabotage, and cognitive and political operations. Over the past few years, the number of these attacks has reached into the hundreds — from the Baltic Sea cable cuttings to GPS jamming over the Nordics to arson plots in Germany. 

“With Europe down a powerful ally, it would create all kinds of opportunities for Russia to increase its hybrid and conventional operations against the west,” Harkness said. 

Giles said that Russia probably follows the principle of not interrupting your enemy when they’re making a mistake, making conventional attacks unlikely. 

“But the word attack covers so many other possible means by which Russia could do damage” to NATO or constituents. 

He added that the labels “hybrid” or “subthreshold” are attached by victim countries to avoid having to do anything about Russian actions, sometimes indistinguishable from acts of war. 

6. No hope for security guarantees

US-backed security guarantees are probably out. The US has lost its credibility as a partner, Litra said. 

But this isn’t a big loss, as several others pointed out there were no guarantees to begin with. Washington’s muddled words on the subject were further undermined by Trump saying he doesn’t think a ceasefire would be needed anyway. 

“I don’t think the Trump White House was ever going to give Ukraine a meaningful security guarantee,” Harkness said. “That will have to come from European allies.”

How strong a guarantee the Europeans will be able to muster without the US remains to be seen. 

Is the lining silver?

What also remains to be seen is whether Washington’s belligerent pressure will finally squeeze the European states closer together and impart them with greater resolve. 

Europe has a big industrial base and a budget that exceeds Russia’s GDP many times over, although their military spending is struggling to catch up. 

“If they decide that this is a priority… if from now on Europe puts serious resources in its defense I think they have a chance to make a military buildup that’s a quite serious deterrent against the Russians,” Litra said. 

However, that’s a pretty big if. When Kraiev looked at the European reaction to Greenland, he saw “weakness. They’re not ready for this type of aggression, even political aggression; nor the military kind, as of now.” 

Giles’ bright side was a bleak one: the Greenland situation may not actually make Ukraine’s bad situation “any worse than it already was.”