Russia has the capacity for a limited attack against NATO territory at any time, but a decision to act would depend on the Western allies’ posture, a top German military official warned in November 2025. “If you look at Russia’s current capabilities and combat power, Russia could kick off a small-scale attack against NATO territory as early as tomorrow,” Lt. Gen. Alexander Sollfrank told Reuters. “And Russia has enough main battle tanks to make a limited attack conceivable as early as tomorrow,” Sollfrank added.
Sollfrank has led the joint operations command since its establishment in 2024, a move that reflected a major shift away from expeditionary missions such as in Afghanistan or Mali back toward the defense of NATO territory. Before taking his current job, Sollfrank ran NATO’s logistics command in the southern German town of Ulm.
Recent drone incursions into Polish airspace have stoked Western fears of Russian escalation. Earlier this year, Berlin loosened its constitutional debt brake to meet NATO’s new core military spending target of 3.5% of national output by 2029, a move that will boost defense spending to some $180 billion in 2029 from almost $86 billion in 2025. Additionally, Germany plans to expand its armed forces by 60,000 troops, bringing its total military personnel to around 260,000.
Sollfrank said whether Moscow might attack NATO would be determined by three factors: Russia’s military strength, military track record and leadership. “These three factors lead me to the conclusion that a Russian attack is in the realm of the possible. Whether it will happen or not depends to a large extent on our own behavior,” he added, alluding to NATO’s deterrence efforts.
The general noted that Moscow’s hybrid warfare tactics, including drone incursions, should be viewed as interconnected elements of a strategy that also included the war on Ukraine. “The Russians call this non-linear warfare. In their doctrine, this is warfare before resorting to conventional weapons. And they threaten to use nuclear weapons, which is warfare by intimidation,” Sollfrank said. Russia’s aim, he added, was to both provoke NATO and to gauge its response, to “foster insecurity, spread fear, to do damage, to spy and to test” the alliance’s resilience.