The new Iron Curtain: Eastern Europe mobilises for defence against Russian aggression

Europe is preparing for war with Russia. On the one hand that seems like a statement of the obvious since European powers have been providing military support to Ukraine over the past three years. On the other hand it is striking to see and hear preparations for war taking concrete form along Nato’s own eastern borders. 

To see the mobile air defence missile launchers recently deployed along the perimeter of the runway as you step off an aircraft at Poland’s Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport, about 100km from the border with Ukraine. And Poland is mining its frontiers with Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave and with Russia’s close ally Belarus as part of its East Shield defence barrier, which some have likened to a new Iron Curtain rising across Europe.

War with Russia — when it might happen, how to prepare for it —  dominated discussion at the big Globsec security conference in Prague last week. The recent warning by German intelligence chief Bruno Kahl that Moscow could soon launch an attack on a European Nato member to test the alliance’s Article 5 mutual defence obligations was the leitmotif of the conference, evidence that the threat was being taken very seriously.

Europe jolting into action to assume greater responsibility for its own defence against Russia was the focus of discussion.

“Putin didn’t wake up Europe. Trump did,” said Estonia’s Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna, pertinently describing how the US president’s threats not to respect America’s Nato obligations had finally concentrated Europe’s collective mind.

At next week’s summit in The Hague, Nato states are expected to increase defence spending from 2% of national GDPs to 3.5% on hard military items such as tanks, warplanes, air defence, missiles and extra troops. A further 1.5% will be spent on things like roads, bridges, ports and airfields.

But there are differences about how and how soon to do that, with frontline states in the east demanding much faster, firmer action than western European states. 

Read more: War in Ukraine

“I believe there is no point to start preparing for the war after the war,” Estonia’s Defence Minister Hanno Pevkur remarked dryly, in response to suggestions that the increased defence spending of Nato member states could take place over three to five years.

No state is more frontline than Estonia, probably the most vulnerable of all Nato member countries, because of its exposed geography and relatively large Russian-speaking minority.

When Kahl, head of  Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND), said he had evidence Russia was preparing to test Nato’s resolve, he added: “They don’t need to send tanks for that. They just have to send ‘little green men’ to Estonia to defend the allegedly oppressed Russian minority.”

The little green men referred to the clandestine Russian soldiers without insignia who seized key strategic facilities in Crimea in 2014 in the opening phase of the Russian occupation of the Ukrainian peninsula.

Romania’s Defence Secretary Sorin-Dan Moldovan agreed with Tsahkna, saying his country needed extra Nato spending in “three to five days, not three to five years”. And he dismissed talk of the eastern flank being more exposed than the western flank, saying increased defence spending was about the collective defence of all of Europe.

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For countries like the Czech Republic (aka Czechia) and Poland, the threat is not only about geography but also about history. As Czech Deputy Foreign Minister Jan Marian told visiting African journalists last week, “in these two countries the understanding of the Russian threat is even more imminent” than for some other Nato countries, because “we have our historical experience with Russian aggressive behaviour”.

He refers to the fact that after World War 2 both countries were forced to become part of the “Eastern Bloc” — satellites of the Soviet Union — and in 1968 Moscow and other countries of the Warsaw Pact sent tanks into what was then Czechoslovakia to crush the “Prague Spring”, a fragile blossoming of very modest freedom.

Poland and Czechoslovakia then contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, finally gaining their independence.

Behind, but improving

The EU took an important step towards greater autonomy and integration in its own defence last year when it appointed its first Commissioner for Defence and Space, Andrius Kubilius.

He was asked at the Globsec conference, though, why the European members of Nato had collectively spent more than $3-trillion on defence over the past decade and yet still had “tiny tank forces, smaller air forces and still felt threatened by a much smaller and weaker Russia”.

Kubilius answered that Nato’s European members had underspent on defence for too long while looking for peace dividends from the US.

He said the European defence industry had become very fragmented and had failed to use the power of a single market to improve its competitiveness. 

European nations were spending only 20% of their defence budgets procuring European production versus 60% on US defence production, undermining European defence productions.

But he noted that things were changing. He recalled that Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte had said when Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Russia was able to produce more ammunition in three months than all Nato members, including the US, were able to produce in a year. 

However, Nato was improving. When the war started, EU states had promised Ukraine one million artillery shells and had only produced about 300,000 a year. This year it got up to two million shells.

“But still we are behind,” Kubilius said, adding that Nato was so far only meeting 53% of its targets for increasing its defence capabilities.

He proposed various remedies, such as cutting red tape so that European defence companies could produce weapons jointly, and also said European countries should increase the joint procurement of weapons. These measures would both increase demand and decrease the costs of European defence production.

But political will is clearly the key. 

War fatigue

Daily Maverick likewise asked both Czech President Petr Pavel and Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky why Ukraine’s many allies were unable to give it all the backing it needed, given their massive economic superiority over Russia. 

Lipavsky suggested the collective political will was lacking, saying: “It goes back to the domestic debate in every allied state on how to support Ukraine and to what extent.

“You can follow the debate in the US, you can follow the debate in Czechia, you can follow the debate in Germany.

“So, yes, we have the power to do so (to help Ukraine win), we need to find a will, and I’m calling for that will regularly.”

Pavel’s reply was that Czechia and Ukraine’s other allies did not aim to defeat or destroy Russia but just to help Ukraine to defend itself against Russia. He agreed that the West had the power to defeat Russia but  remained cautious because it did not want to provoke Russia into a major conflict since it was armed with about 6,000 ballistic nuclear weapons.

And even if Russia only deployed tactical nuclear weapons that would be disastrous. He said some European countries were cautious as they wished to resume economic relations with Russia when the war ended.

But Pavel also observed that if Ukraine’s allies had shown greater political will and fully supported the Ukraine from the start, it would have won the war in the first year and avoided the current stalemate where it now only seemed possible to reach a compromise settlement in which Ukraine would have to cede up to 20% of its territory that Russia occupies. 

And there is a danger that the unity of Europe’s political resolve to support Ukraine may be weakening, even as the EU steps up its efforts to increase support. “War fatigue”  seems to be setting in among populations grown weary of war talk, and war spending. 

Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has opposed military support to Ukraine from the start. Slovakia’s recently elected populist Prime Minister Robert Fico has also suggested that his country might be better off neutral.

Karol Nawrocki, Poland’s newly elected president, who takes office in August, is ambivalent on Ukraine. He has publicly expressed opposition to Ukraine’s accession to Nato and the European Union while also saying Poland should “support Ukraine from a strategic and geopolitical point of view”.

And in Czechia, the opposition ANO party led by former prime minister Andrej Babiš, which is leading in the polls for October election, is also ambivalent about the war. He has criticised current Prime Minister Petr Fiala’s shipping of heavy weapons to help Kyiv and his initiative to find and fund artillery ammunition for Ukraine’s defence. 

Read more: Does Russia intend to restart Ukraine’s occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant?

Globsec published a list of seven possible scenarios for the progress of the war over the next two years, which assigned the highest probability, 38%, to a scenario in which the war of attrition continued but with “lowered intensity of hostilities due to draining out of resources on both sides”.

It noted: “The trajectory of the war will be increasingly shaped by whether Europe, particularly a ‘Coalition of the Willing’, can swiftly and quickly construct a credible, unified military and economic support framework for Ukraine in the absence of strong US leadership. Failure to do so risks weakening Ukraine’s long-term capacity to resist and may create openings for Russian coercive diplomacy or territorial advances.” DM

Peter Fabricius is visiting the Czech Republic, Poland and Ukraine on a journalists’ study tour sponsored by those three governments.