(Bloomberg) -- Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is forcing Europe to quickly redraw the security arrangements that underpinned peace on the continent for decades.
While the North Atlantic Treaty Organization hasn’t deployed troops on the ground in Ukraine -- that would bring it into direct conflict with Russia -- member states are shipping both money and weapons there in an effort to shore up the country and its under-siege president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
The military alliance is also sending thousands more troops to its eastern frontier to send a pointed warning to President Vladimir Putin: Don’t move your forces any further into Europe than Ukraine or you risk engaging us directly.
Beyond that, countries in Europe are talking about how to overhaul their defenses from the Baltic to the Black Sea as tensions with nuclear-armed Russia reach levels not seen since the Cold War. Officials say there is no concrete threat against NATO at the moment, but they are worried about what President Vladimir Putin might do next.
“We thought that peace was already a given,” Deividas Matulionis, Lithuania’s ambassador to NATO, said in an interview. “We were wrong. We all were wrong.”
Putin says that NATO forces on Russia’s borders are a threat to his country’s security and, in the days before he moved into Ukraine, had demanded all troops and weaponry be withdrawn from Eastern Europe. And it’s possible that the reinforcement by NATO of its eastern flank could provoke a further escalation by the Kremlin. Since the war began, Putin has moved his nuclear forces onto a higher alert setting.
Despite NATO’s build-up of thousands of troops, the presence still amounts to far less than the estimated 150,000 soldiers Putin amassed around Ukraine ahead of his attack, and would struggle to contain any push by Russian forces further west.
The reinforcements from NATO have an important role to play either way, according to Kristine Berzina, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Washington, D.C. But it would have helped it they had been sent in sooner, she added.
“The underestimation from Moscow of European and transatlantic and American resolve for smaller European countries I think led to the situation,” Berzina said. “The fact there is a lot of military resolve, that there is an understanding of the possibility for territorial conflict, if that had been more explicit, perhaps Russia would have felt it didn’t need to test that.”
Read More: Extra, U.S. Allied Troops Bolster NATO’s Eastern Flank
The three Baltic nations -- Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia -- are particularly anxious about Putin’s actions. The former Soviet states have been insisting for years that Russia could pose a threat to Europe’s security and the war in Ukraine is bringing their allies around to that conclusion.
Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas called on NATO states to urgently upgrade their defenses with a permanent presence for alliance troops and more serious air power. Estonia will boost defense spending to 2.3% of GDP next year, while Latvia and Lithuania will increase spending to as much as 2.5% of GDP in the coming years.
The biggest shift is in Germany.
For years Berlin has fallen well short of NATO’s 2% target for defense spending, to the frustration of successive U.S. administrations. Just days after Putin sent his troops into Ukraine. Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced 100 billion euros ($110 billion) in new spending this year to modernize the Germany military and a permanent increase to meet the NATO target from 2024.
Scholz said the actions of the Russian president had ushered in “a new era” for Europe. NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg has said it means a “new normal” in relations with the Kremlin.
“This will have some long-term effects on our security, on how we respond, on how NATO is reacting and also on how our relationship with Russia can evolve,” Stoltenberg said on Feb. 24, the day Russia started its assault.
NATO is looking to at least double its forces along its eastern flank with a minimum of four additional battle groups in Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria, according to an alliance official. France is volunteering to lead one group in Romania, which shares a border of almost 400 miles (640 kilometers) with Ukraine, and military commanders have already been hashing out their options.
NATO already has a total of around 5,000 troops in Poland and the Baltic states, established after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Weeks before the invasion, U.S. envoy to NATO Julianne Smith warned that Russia’s aggression would result in the exact opposite of what Moscow says it wants. “What we’ve tried to help the Russians understand is that they have spent many years complaining about NATO troops coming closer to their border, and unfortunately it is their actions – Russian actions, Russian aggression – that has resulted in more posture moving into Central and Eastern Europe,” Smith told reporters on a briefing call.
As they boost their presence in the east of the alliance, NATO allies are holding back from any kind of military intervention in Ukraine so as not to escalate the war further and trigger direct confrontation with Russia. That means NATO has ruled out putting boots on the ground, but also defending Ukraine’s airspace -- what is known as a no-fly zone -- which could involve allied planes confronting Russian aircraft.
Even as popular support grows in Finland to join the alliance, there is also little political appetite from the government, as well as in Sweden, to join any time soon.
Read More: Finnish Leader Sees No Rush on NATO Entry After Ukraine Invasion
While NATO has had an ongoing presence in its members in Eastern Europe, the troops have been regularly rotated out in order to comply with the NATO-Russia Founding Act, signed in 1997 to declare mutual commitments to peace in Europe.
Russia has repeatedly violated the Act by not respecting countries’ borders, NATO officials say, leading to a debate about whether troops should be stationed in the east permanently. That would give them a better understanding of the local conditions and allow them to deepen relationships with local counterparts.
NATO also has a missile-defense base in Romania and is building another in Poland. There are no offensive missiles there but Putin has repeatedly suggested the Aegis Ashore missile-defense systems could be used to fire Tomahawks, because they use the same launchers.
The buffer zone between the two sides could be narrowed further after voters in Belarus, a Russian ally, on Sunday backed a constitutional reform to allow nuclear weapons to be stationed in their country for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. President Alexander Lukashenko is increasingly reliant on Putin after lashing out at U.S. and European Union sanctions over his crackdown on opposition protesters after disputed 2020 elections.
“The stationing of Russian troops in Belarus and the risk of Belarus hosting nuclear weapons changes the strategic security landscape,” Latvian ambassador to NATO Edgars Skuja said in emailed comments.
While Stoltenberg called Putin’s move to put Russia’s nuclear command on high alert “irresponsible, reckless” in an interview with Bloomberg TV, he added NATO is not changing the status of its nuclear forces.
“It is the responsibility for NATO to ensure we don’t see a development where a conflict in Ukraine spirals out of control and becomes a full-fledged confrontation between NATO and Russia in Europe,” he said.
©2022 Bloomberg L.P.
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