Russia Responds to Report About War With NATO

Moscow has mocked an article in a German newspaper which says Berlin is preparing for an armed conflict between NATO and Russia.

Bild said a classified document it had seen showed how the German armed forces, the Bundeswehr, were preparing for an attack by Moscow on the alliance's eastern flank and outlined a "path to conflict" between Russia and NATO, according to a translation.

The document seen by the mass-circulation tabloid, which appears to be a training scenario, has not been independently verified. Newsweek has contacted the German Defense Ministry and NATO for comment.

Russian foreign affairs spokeswoman Maria Zakharova dismissed the predictions as the kind you would find in a "horoscope."

Central to the case for continued military support among Ukraine's allies to fight Russian aggression is the argument that it is fighting for all the West. In December 2023, President Joe Biden said that if Vladimir Putin won in Ukraine, Russia would attack an alliance member, a claim dismissed by the Russian president as "complete nonsense."

Zakharova derided the reported scenario in a post on Telegram. "I read the German 'secret plan' leaked into the Bild information gutter. It's like a mighty horoscope from last year for Pisces in Cancer," she said.

"I suppose that the analysis was undertaken by the German Foreign Ministry headed by [Annalena] Baerbock."

Under Article 5 of NATO's treaty, an armed attack on an alliance member is considered an attack on all and would force a collective response. Kyiv's allies have tried to provide aid without getting directly involved in the war.

Bild said the document "Alliance Defense 2025" outlined a scenario in which escalation could start as early as February, when Russia would launch another wave of mobilization.

The article said that the report it had seen outlined a scenario where, emboldened by faltering Western support for Kyiv, Moscow would launch a spring offensive that could push back the Ukrainian army.

By July, Russia could start conducting cyberattacks and other forms of hybrid warfare, mainly in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, where they would incite ethnic Russian minorities.

Russia could use these clashes as a pretext to deploy troops to the region via its Zapad 2024 exercise involving 50,000 troops in western Russia and Belarus from September.

Medium-range missile systems deployed to its exclave of Kaliningrad could allow Russia to exploit the interim period after the U.S. election and repeat its 2014 invasion of Crimea, but this time on NATO territory.

Border conflicts" and "unrests with numerous casualties" were possible in the "Suwalki corridor" between Belarus and Kaliningrad along the Polish-Lithuanian border by December and Russia, according to the report which predicted the deployment of hundreds of thousands of NATO troops and an "outbreak of war in the summer of 2025."

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