On 30 April, the US announced it was withdrawing 5,000 troops from Germany. US President Donald Trump threatened the same for Italy and Spain. Meanwhile, European defense officials and lawmakers say the next year or two, while the bloc is still rearming and Trump is in the White House, is when they expect Russia to test the alliance, according to Politico.
European officials have warned for two years that Russia could test NATO before the bloc finishes rearming. The US troop withdrawal and 2030 EU readiness target make that window present, not future.
"Something could happen very soon—there is a Russian window of opportunity," Mika Aaltola, a Finnish center-right MEP on the European Parliament's foreign affairs committee, told the publication.
The EU's Defense Readiness Roadmap aims for 2030. That's four years away. The two timelines don't match. They haven't matched for some time.
What ran in Politico this week is the loudest the room has been about it. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk warned on X that the greatest threat to the transatlantic community is not its external enemies, but "the ongoing disintegration of our alliance."
"We must all do what it takes to reverse this disastrous trend", he said.
Two years of warnings
The Politico reporting did not arrive in a vacuum. It is the latest entry in a sustained public warning from European intelligence services, defense ministers, and military chiefs. The dates form their own pattern.
In February 2024, Lithuania's then-foreign minister Gabrielius Landsbergis told German broadcaster Tagesschau that NATO could not "wait for our Pearl Harbor moment."
That same month, Estonia's Foreign Intelligence Service warned that Russia was preparing for a "long-term confrontation" with the West. The agency also said that Moscow intended to double its troop presence along the borders with Finland and the Baltics, increasing total armed forces from 1.15 million to 1.5 million by 2026. Denmark's defense minister told Reuters Russia could attack a NATO country within three to five years.
In March 2024, ex-Polish President Andrzej Duda told CNBC that "as early as perhaps 2026 or 2027, Putin, by putting his economy on a war footing, will have such military might that he will be able to attack NATO." That was the former Polish leader, citing German analyst forecasts, naming the same window European officials are now describing as open.
In June 2024, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius told the German parliament the army must be kriegstüchtig—war-ready—by 2029.
"Putin's war economy is working toward another conflict," he said.
Norway's chief of defense, General Eirik Kristoffersen, told Bloomberg that NATO had a two- to three-year window before Russia could rebuild its conventional attack capability.
In October 2024, BND chief Bruno Kahl said in a Bundestag hearing that "in terms of personnel and material, Russian armed forces are likely to be capable of carrying out an attack against NATO by the end of the decade at the latest."
A direct confrontation, he said, was "becoming an option for Russia." Two months later, Russia's own defense minister, Andrei Belousov, publicly told a defense ministry meeting that Moscow must "be prepared for any development, including a possible military conflict with NATO in Europe in the next decade."
In February 2025, Latvia's Constitution Protection Bureau warned in an unclassified report that any "frozen" war in Ukraine would allow Moscow to "increase its military presence next to NATO's northeastern flank, including the Baltic, within the next five years."
Three weeks earlier, Trump had announced peace talks with Putin. The Danish Defense Intelligence Service, that same month, said Russia could be ready to wage a "large-scale war" in Europe within five years.
In March 2026, the chief of the Czech General Staff, Karel Řehka, said most NATO defense leaders believe Russia could attempt to attack alliance territory by 2029.
The dates are a chorus. The melody hasn't changed.
Russia built while Europe planned
According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Russia's military spending in 2024, adjusted for purchasing power parity, reached $462 billion, surpassing the combined defense budgets of the EU and the UK by roughly $5 billion. Russia has tripled its defense spending since 2021. In 2025, the figure climbed to 7.3% of GDP and roughly 40% of federal spending, the IISS found in February.
European defense spending has risen as well. The continental average reached 2.16% of GDP in 2025, with Germany and Poland accounting for most of the growth, and Latvia now at 4.91%. Production capacity is being added in Germany and elsewhere.
But the EU's own Defense Readiness Roadmap does not aim for the bloc to be ready to "credibly deter its adversaries and respond to any aggression" until 2030. Bastian Giegerich, IISS director-general, said there is "little indication" that Russia's ability to fight a fifth year in Ukraine has diminished, and that the country's threat to Europe is growing.
The question European officials are now asking is not whether Russia could mount a full conventional invasion of a NATO state, almost no one in the discussion suggests it could right now, but whether Russia might attempt something smaller, calibrated, and ambiguous.
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Not invasion. Test
That smaller form is what most senior European defense voices are now describing.
"It could be a drone operation, it could be a Baltic Sea operation. It could be something in the Arctic, targeting small islands," Aaltola told Politico.
Russia has a shadow fleet that is already partly militarized.
"A drone attack doesn't require troops, it doesn't require crossing the border," he said.
The strategic logic is that an attack designed to create ambiguity around Article 5—NATO's mutual defense clause—would test the alliance's political unity rather than its military strength. If member states cannot agree that an incident crossed the threshold, Article 5 doesn't get invoked. Trump has already publicly called NATO "a paper tiger." Bruno Kahl noted in November 2024 that German intelligence assessments suggested Russian defense ministry chiefs themselves doubted Article 5 would in fact be invoked in case of an attack on a member.
In September and October 2025, Russian aircraft and drones brushed Estonia's borders, briefly crossed into Romania, and violated Polish airspace. Each incident, taken alone, could be dismissed as a navigational error or military bravado. Together, the European Council on Foreign Relations wrote in January 2026, the incursions "seem to many in Europe like probes: a deliberate attempt by Russia to test NATO's resolve."
Ukraine's foreign minister Andrii Sybiha framed the recent pattern in similar terms. "The Russians are sending a signal" by accusing the Baltics of allowing Ukrainian drones to use their airspace, he told reporters. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggested in a TV interview that Russia could be gearing up to make a move on "one of the Baltics, for example."
Landsbergis, who has warned about Putin's window for two years, put it to Politico this way: Putin could "escalate horizontally against another neighbor, trying to avoid a humiliating negotiation with Ukraine." That framing fits something Latvian intelligence flagged 14 months ago. A frozen war doesn't end the threat. It releases the troops.
Where allies disagree
Not everyone reads the room the same way. Estonian President Alar Karis said he found the prospect of a Russian attack on the Baltics "highly unlikely", as Russia is "very busy in Ukraine" and lacks the capacity. The senior NATO diplomat the publication quoted called it "highly unlikely" too, saying Putin's "suicidal trend has its limits, especially when there is no apparent evident and immediate gain."
A second senior European defense official told the journalists that while Russia "sees itself in a long-term confrontation with the West... we currently maintain our assessment that there is no short-term military threat to NATO due to Russia's engagement in Ukraine."
The disagreement is not new. Estonia's foreign intelligence director, Kaupo Rosin, told public broadcaster ERR in December 2025 that there is "no indication" Putin is planning to attack the Baltics or NATO.
"So far, it's still clear that Russia respects NATO and is currently trying to avoid any open conflict," he stressed.
Aaltola argues the cautious assessment carries its own risk. A false sense of security, he said, "is actually the worst thing you can create" in democratic countries.
"We need to allocate resources, and if there's a false sense of security, then resources are not allocated to defense," Aaltola said.
Karis ended his comments to Politico by acknowledging the limits of any assessment. "You never know. And nobody was expecting the war in Ukraine."
What calendar says
The 2030 readiness target was set when European officials still assumed they had time. The cumulative public warnings from intelligence services and defense ministers across nine countries say the time may have run shorter than the plan accounts for. The US troop withdrawal from Germany announced last Friday is the most concrete signal, yet that the political environment Aaltola described with Trump in the White House, transatlantic relations strained, EU not ready, is not a forecast. It's the present.
European defense spending has grown. Production is scaling. Finland and Sweden joined the alliance. Poland is at 5% of GDP. Latvia has reached nearly 5%. None of that is finished.
Whether the chorus that has been singing for two years is now being heard in the ministries that write budget timelines, or whether the 2030 calendar will remain the binding document until something happens that overrides it, is a question this week's news did not answer.
