The Russian Military Moves That Have Europe on Edge
Putin is expanding bases and preparing to move more troops to European border regions far from Ukraine. “We’re expecting some conflict with NATO.”
HELSINKI—With President Trump and many other world leaders preoccupied with the war in Ukraine, some Europeans are growing alarmed about what the Russian army has been doing much more quietly along other stretches of its border with Europe.
Some 100 miles east of its border with Finland, in the Russian city of Petrozavodsk, military engineers are expanding army bases where the Kremlin plans to create a new army headquarters to oversee tens of thousands of troops over the next several years.
Those soldiers, many now serving on the front lines in Ukraine, are intended to be the backbone of a Russian military preparing to face off with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, according to Western military and intelligence officials. The Kremlin is expanding military recruitment, bolstering weapons production and upgrading railroad lines in border areas.
Finland, which was forced to surrender territory to the Soviet Union in 1940, has spent decades trying to avoid confrontation with Moscow. Now, having joined NATO after the Ukraine invasion, it is fortifying its border with electronic defenses and barbed wire fencing.
Trump, who has been pressuring Ukraine to accept a cease-fire deal while trying to rebuild U.S. ties with the Kremlin, has said worries that Russia has any ambitions beyond Ukraine are overblown. Asked in February about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s warning that Russia could wage war on NATO if the U.S. reduces support for the alliance, Trump said: “I don’t agree with that, not even a little bit.”
Military experts inside Russia, though, characterize the activity along the Finnish border as part of the Kremlin’s preparation for potential conflict with NATO.
“When the troops are back [from Ukraine], they will be looking over the border at a country they consider an adversary,” said Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Center for the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a Moscow-based defense think tank. “The logic of the last decade shows we’re expecting some conflict with NATO.”
Russian officials have sent mixed signals. At a defense ministry meeting late last year, Russia’s Defense Minister Andrey Belousov said Russia’s military must be ready for a conflict with NATO. At the same gathering, President Vladimir Putin said the West was alarming its own population by suggesting that Russia was ready to attack, and that current tensions were NATO’s doing.
As Russia prepares to increase its military presence along NATO’s eastern flank, Putin has ordered the military to expand its ranks to as many as 1.5 million troops, up from around one million before the Ukraine invasion.
Russia has increased military spending to more than 6% of GDP this year, from 3.6% before the war. By comparison, the U.S. spent 3.4% of its GDP on its military last year, and EU countries, on average, spent 2.1%.
Arms buildup
Russia’s increased spending has pushed arms factories to capacity, prompting military industrial firms to expand production lines and open new facilities, according to European military officials.
In 2021, before the invasion, Russia made about 40 of its main battle tanks, the T-90M, according to Western intelligence estimates. Now it is producing nearly 300 a year. A senior Finnish military official said almost none are being sent to the front line in Ukraine, but are staying on Russian soil for later use.
Production of artillery cannons and munitions is expected to rise by around 20% this year, and drone quality and production have increased significantly.
“The Russian military is reconstituting and growing at a faster rate than most analysts had anticipated,” Gen. Christopher Cavoli, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, told a Senate committee this month. “In fact, the Russian army, which has borne the brunt of combat, is today larger than it was at the beginning of the war.”
In a February report, the Danish intelligence agency warned that Russia could launch a large-scale war in Europe within five years if it perceived NATO to be weak. A cease-fire in Ukraine would allow Russia’s military to be ready even faster, Western military officials warn.
Some NATO nations are fortifying their borders against tanks, digging trenches and installing pyramid-shaped obstacles known as dragon’s teeth. Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have withdrawn from an international treaty banning antipersonnel mines.
“We don’t have too much time,” said Polish Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz in an interview. “We must build a strong alliance, a strong command system and well equipped military forces.”
Western officials have cited covert operations Russia is believed to have carried out in Europe in recent years as evidence of Moscow’s determination to destabilize the West and retaliate for its support of Ukraine. Russian military intelligence is believed to be behind plots to plant incendiary devices on planes operated by shipping giant DHL and to kill the chief executive of a German arms maker.
One European intelligence official said Russia could try to test the alliance’s cohesion with an incursion into a small NATO nation, such as Estonia, which has a sizable Russian population.
Russia’s ability to take on NATO will depend in part on its ability to rebuild its forces after the war in Ukraine, which has depleted its officer corps but provided experience in precision fire.
“If you ask how soon the Russian military could conduct a limited operation against Baltic states, the answer could be quite soon,” said Michael Kofman, senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington think tank. Baltic officials, he said, are “looking at a two to three year timeline after the war. If the benchmark is a large-scale war, presumably with NATO, the timeline could be more like seven to 10 years, depending on the scenario.”
Military revival
For centuries, Russia’s military made it one of Europe’s great powers. It routed both Napoleon and Hitler after each dared invade Russian territory. The Soviet Union’s entry into World War II changed the direction of the conflict and set the stage for the Cold War era that followed.
Putin has drawn on that military legacy to justify the war in Ukraine and Russia’s efforts to claw back influence in Europe, where former allies such as Ukraine have drifted toward the West. Russia appears to be betting that a military expansion along NATO borders will force the West to re-engage with a stronger Moscow.
“Russia and Europe will need to restart dialogue with a clear understanding of one another’s capabilities, an understanding of the fact that we’re enemies,” said Vasily Kashin, director of the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies at the Moscow-based Higher School of Economics.
To concentrate its forces to the West, last year the Kremlin changed the way it organizes its forces inside the country, creating new districts tied to the defense of its biggest cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg.
In the Moscow military district, Russia has been integrating the road and rail routes used by its military with those in neighboring Belarus, Moscow’s closest ally and a staging ground for the initial invasion of Ukraine.
Most of the manpower expansion will take place in the Leningrad district, which faces Estonia, Latvia and Finland. Smaller brigades will nearly triple in size to become divisions of 10,000 around troops, according to Western military and intelligence officials.
“No matter how they may try to innovate on a tactical or operational level, for the Russians, size matters,” said Maj. Gen. Sami Nurmi, Finland’s deputy chief of staff responsible for strategy. “It always comes down to numbers.”
Russia is planning to build new barracks and training grounds and to upgrade arsenals and railroad lines to accommodate the swelling troop numbers in and around Petrozavodsk.
In December, Russian state television showed some 100 Russian soldiers marching through the city’s center to celebrate the restoration of a Soviet-era railroad brigade tasked with laying the new rails. “You are the first ones, the first unit being revived,” Andrei Artyomov, commissar for the broader Karelian region, told the assembled troops.
The new infrastructure being built includes storage units and troops housing, said Emil Kastehelmi of the Finland-based Black Bird Group, which analyzes satellite images of Russian military sites. New rail is being laid along the borders with Finland and Norway, and south of St. Petersburg to the Estonian border. Existing lines that cross the region are being expanded.
Finland is watching to see where those new lines might go.
“There are about a dozen points along the Russian-Finnish border where you can cross the border with mechanized forces,” said Maj. Juha Kukkola, a professor at the National Defense University in Helsinki and an expert on the Russian military. “If you see them building new railheads or renovating old ones, it would be good to start paying attention.”
To accommodate more troops, Russia’s Defense Ministry has said it is refurbishing a 19th century military hospital in St. Petersburg.
Recruiting push
In recent months, Russia has seen a sharp rise in recruitment because of generous one-time signing bonuses at both the federal and regional levels. The payments, in some cases, can amount to around $20,000.
“These one-time payments have gone up considerably, making them more than what many people would earn for an entire year otherwise,” said Iikka Korhonen, the director of the Bank of Finland’s Institute for Emerging Economies, which tracks the Russian economy.
The U.S. estimates that around 30,000 Russians are signing up each month, up from about 25,000 last summer. Some Eastern European intelligence officials say the ranks are now swelling by some 40,000 soldiers a month.
The extra manpower has allowed the military to rotate new troops in and out of Ukraine, and to build new units trained and housed in Russia, according to some European intelligence assessments.
To aid recruitment, federal and regional governments have boosted benefits for veterans and their families and invited the soldiers to sit on city councils and in the Russian parliament.
“What we’re seeing is the military becoming a new type of elite,” said Daivis Petraitis, a Russia expert at the Baltic Defense College in Estonia. “They won’t have trouble with recruitment.”
Russia is tailoring its rearmament plans to meet the needs of the new troops to be stationed along its NATO border. Those units will get much of the new equipment. Most of what is being sent to the front line in Ukraine is old and refurbished Soviet-era arms.
“Very rarely are newly built vehicles observed or destroyed lately,” said Dara Massicot, senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment, who wrote a report on Russia’s military reconstitution.
Later this year, Russia is expected to showcase its first steps in that process in its annual strategic military exercises. This year the exercises—called Zapad, or West—are expected to train forces in regions that border NATO countries.
Military officials on NATO’s eastern flank expect a show intended to deter Europe from ratcheting up tensions with Russia. Regardless of the state of cease-fire talks, they said, the Kremlin wants to be taken seriously in Europe.
“If you look at Russian military history from Peter the Great to today, I can understand why they think they deserve a seat at the table,” said Maj. Kukkola.
“They’ve been in Paris after routing Napoleon, they were in Berlin after routing the Nazis,” he said. “I don’t agree with it, but I understand why they want to change European security architecture, and they’re leveraging their military might to make it happen.”
Write to Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com
HELSINKI—With President Trump and many other world leaders preoccupied with the war in Ukraine, some Europeans are growing alarmed about what the Russian army has been doing much more quietly along other stretches of its border with Europe.
Some 100 miles east of its border with Finland, in the Russian city of Petrozavodsk, military engineers are expanding army bases where the Kremlin plans to create a new army headquarters to oversee tens of thousands of troops over the next several years.
Those soldiers, many now serving on the front lines in Ukraine, are intended to be the backbone of a Russian military preparing to face off with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, according to Western military and intelligence officials. The Kremlin is expanding military recruitment, bolstering weapons production and upgrading railroad lines in border areas.
Finland, which was forced to surrender territory to the Soviet Union in 1940, has spent decades trying to avoid confrontation with Moscow. Now, having joined NATO after the Ukraine invasion, it is fortifying its border with electronic defenses and barbed wire fencing.
Trump, who has been pressuring Ukraine to accept a cease-fire deal while trying to rebuild U.S. ties with the Kremlin, has said worries that Russia has any ambitions beyond Ukraine are overblown. Asked in February about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s warning that Russia could wage war on NATO if the U.S. reduces support for the alliance, Trump said: “I don’t agree with that, not even a little bit.”
Military experts inside Russia, though, characterize the activity along the Finnish border as part of the Kremlin’s preparation for potential conflict with NATO.
“When the troops are back [from Ukraine], they will be looking over the border at a country they consider an adversary,” said Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Center for the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a Moscow-based defense think tank. “The logic of the last decade shows we’re expecting some conflict with NATO.”
Russian officials have sent mixed signals. At a defense ministry meeting late last year, Russia’s Defense Minister Andrey Belousov said Russia’s military must be ready for a conflict with NATO. At the same gathering, President Vladimir Putin said the West was alarming its own population by suggesting that Russia was ready to attack, and that current tensions were NATO’s doing.
As Russia prepares to increase its military presence along NATO’s eastern flank, Putin has ordered the military to expand its ranks to as many as 1.5 million troops, up from around one million before the Ukraine invasion.
Russia has increased military spending to more than 6% of GDP this year, from 3.6% before the war. By comparison, the U.S. spent 3.4% of its GDP on its military last year, and EU countries, on average, spent 2.1%.
Arms buildup
Russia’s increased spending has pushed arms factories to capacity, prompting military industrial firms to expand production lines and open new facilities, according to European military officials.
In 2021, before the invasion, Russia made about 40 of its main battle tanks, the T-90M, according to Western intelligence estimates. Now it is producing nearly 300 a year. A senior Finnish military official said almost none are being sent to the front line in Ukraine, but are staying on Russian soil for later use.
Production of artillery cannons and munitions is expected to rise by around 20% this year, and drone quality and production have increased significantly.
“The Russian military is reconstituting and growing at a faster rate than most analysts had anticipated,” Gen. Christopher Cavoli, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, told a Senate committee this month. “In fact, the Russian army, which has borne the brunt of combat, is today larger than it was at the beginning of the war.”
In a February report, the Danish intelligence agency warned that Russia could launch a large-scale war in Europe within five years if it perceived NATO to be weak. A cease-fire in Ukraine would allow Russia’s military to be ready even faster, Western military officials warn.
Some NATO nations are fortifying their borders against tanks, digging trenches and installing pyramid-shaped obstacles known as dragon’s teeth. Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have withdrawn from an international treaty banning antipersonnel mines.
“We don’t have too much time,” said Polish Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz in an interview. “We must build a strong alliance, a strong command system and well equipped military forces.”
Western officials have cited covert operations Russia is believed to have carried out in Europe in recent years as evidence of Moscow’s determination to destabilize the West and retaliate for its support of Ukraine. Russian military intelligence is believed to be behind plots to plant incendiary devices on planes operated by shipping giant DHL and to kill the chief executive of a German arms maker.
One European intelligence official said Russia could try to test the alliance’s cohesion with an incursion into a small NATO nation, such as Estonia, which has a sizable Russian population.
Russia’s ability to take on NATO will depend in part on its ability to rebuild its forces after the war in Ukraine, which has depleted its officer corps but provided experience in precision fire.
“If you ask how soon the Russian military could conduct a limited operation against Baltic states, the answer could be quite soon,” said Michael Kofman, senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington think tank. Baltic officials, he said, are “looking at a two to three year timeline after the war. If the benchmark is a large-scale war, presumably with NATO, the timeline could be more like seven to 10 years, depending on the scenario.”
Military revival
For centuries, Russia’s military made it one of Europe’s great powers. It routed both Napoleon and Hitler after each dared invade Russian territory. The Soviet Union’s entry into World War II changed the direction of the conflict and set the stage for the Cold War era that followed.
Putin has drawn on that military legacy to justify the war in Ukraine and Russia’s efforts to claw back influence in Europe, where former allies such as Ukraine have drifted toward the West. Russia appears to be betting that a military expansion along NATO borders will force the West to re-engage with a stronger Moscow.
“Russia and Europe will need to restart dialogue with a clear understanding of one another’s capabilities, an understanding of the fact that we’re enemies,” said Vasily Kashin, director of the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies at the Moscow-based Higher School of Economics.
To concentrate its forces to the West, last year the Kremlin changed the way it organizes its forces inside the country, creating new districts tied to the defense of its biggest cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg.
In the Moscow military district, Russia has been integrating the road and rail routes used by its military with those in neighboring Belarus, Moscow’s closest ally and a staging ground for the initial invasion of Ukraine.
Most of the manpower expansion will take place in the Leningrad district, which faces Estonia, Latvia and Finland. Smaller brigades will nearly triple in size to become divisions of 10,000 around troops, according to Western military and intelligence officials.
“No matter how they may try to innovate on a tactical or operational level, for the Russians, size matters,” said Maj. Gen. Sami Nurmi, Finland’s deputy chief of staff responsible for strategy. “It always comes down to numbers.”
Russia is planning to build new barracks and training grounds and to upgrade arsenals and railroad lines to accommodate the swelling troop numbers in and around Petrozavodsk.
In December, Russian state television showed some 100 Russian soldiers marching through the city’s center to celebrate the restoration of a Soviet-era railroad brigade tasked with laying the new rails. “You are the first ones, the first unit being revived,” Andrei Artyomov, commissar for the broader Karelian region, told the assembled troops.
The new infrastructure being built includes storage units and troops housing, said Emil Kastehelmi of the Finland-based Black Bird Group, which analyzes satellite images of Russian military sites. New rail is being laid along the borders with Finland and Norway, and south of St. Petersburg to the Estonian border. Existing lines that cross the region are being expanded.
Finland is watching to see where those new lines might go.
“There are about a dozen points along the Russian-Finnish border where you can cross the border with mechanized forces,” said Maj. Juha Kukkola, a professor at the National Defense University in Helsinki and an expert on the Russian military. “If you see them building new railheads or renovating old ones, it would be good to start paying attention.”
To accommodate more troops, Russia’s Defense Ministry has said it is refurbishing a 19th century military hospital in St. Petersburg.
Recruiting push
In recent months, Russia has seen a sharp rise in recruitment because of generous one-time signing bonuses at both the federal and regional levels. The payments, in some cases, can amount to around $20,000.
“These one-time payments have gone up considerably, making them more than what many people would earn for an entire year otherwise,” said Iikka Korhonen, the director of the Bank of Finland’s Institute for Emerging Economies, which tracks the Russian economy.
The U.S. estimates that around 30,000 Russians are signing up each month, up from about 25,000 last summer. Some Eastern European intelligence officials say the ranks are now swelling by some 40,000 soldiers a month.
The extra manpower has allowed the military to rotate new troops in and out of Ukraine, and to build new units trained and housed in Russia, according to some European intelligence assessments.
To aid recruitment, federal and regional governments have boosted benefits for veterans and their families and invited the soldiers to sit on city councils and in the Russian parliament.
“What we’re seeing is the military becoming a new type of elite,” said Daivis Petraitis, a Russia expert at the Baltic Defense College in Estonia. “They won’t have trouble with recruitment.”
Russia is tailoring its rearmament plans to meet the needs of the new troops to be stationed along its NATO border. Those units will get much of the new equipment. Most of what is being sent to the front line in Ukraine is old and refurbished Soviet-era arms.
“Very rarely are newly built vehicles observed or destroyed lately,” said Dara Massicot, senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment, who wrote a report on Russia’s military reconstitution.
Later this year, Russia is expected to showcase its first steps in that process in its annual strategic military exercises. This year the exercises—called Zapad, or West—are expected to train forces in regions that border NATO countries.
Military officials on NATO’s eastern flank expect a show intended to deter Europe from ratcheting up tensions with Russia. Regardless of the state of cease-fire talks, they said, the Kremlin wants to be taken seriously in Europe.
“If you look at Russian military history from Peter the Great to today, I can understand why they think they deserve a seat at the table,” said Maj. Kukkola.
“They’ve been in Paris after routing Napoleon, they were in Berlin after routing the Nazis,” he said. “I don’t agree with it, but I understand why they want to change European security architecture, and they’re leveraging their military might to make it happen.”
Write to Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com
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