Sweden's Military Intelligence and Security Service (MUST) has designated Russia as the foremost military threat to Sweden and the NATO alliance, warning that Moscow's increasingly reckless behavior risks triggering dangerous escalation. The assessment, published on 17 Februaryband reported by Politico, marks one of Stockholm's sharpest public judgments of Russian intentions to date.
"Russia represents the main military threat to Sweden and NATO. This threat is serious and concrete, and Moscow's actions are opportunistic and aggressive," the annual report states. The document cites airspace violations by drones and aircraft, sabotage operations, and cyberattacks across the Baltic Sea region as examples of what it characterizes as a sustained pattern of hostile conduct.
The Swedish report follows a similar assessment released last week by Estonia's Foreign Intelligence Service, which described Russia as "dangerous despite its incompetence." Estonian intelligence stopped short of sounding an alarm, however, noting it had found no evidence that Moscow was planning an attack on Estonia or NATO in the near term — in part because of Europe's strengthening defenses.
A senior NATO official, speaking at a briefing attended by Politico, confirmed the broad thrust of both assessments. The official pointed to Article 5 credibility and allied commitments to raise defense spending to 3.5 percent of GDP as the primary deterrents. But the official also flagged what both the Estonian report and NATO now treat as a structural concern: Russia has dramatically scaled up its artillery production since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022.
Estonian intelligence estimates that Russian shell and artillery production has grown 17-fold since the start of the war. "You can't just switch all that off on the day the war ends," the NATO official said, adding that in certain domains Russia would emerge from the conflict as a stronger military power than it was when the fighting started.
That trajectory, both intelligence services suggest, means Moscow will remain a credible military threat to Europe regardless of how or when the war in Ukraine concludes.
