According to a Wall Street Journal report citing US intelligence, Russia could be preparing a limited incursion against a NATO member state within weeks. The report comes as the war in Ukraine remains largely deadlocked and the impact of the conflict is increasingly felt inside Russia.
Analysts cited in the report suggest Vladimir Putin may seek to open a new front rather than risk being remembered as the leader who lost Ukraine, raising fresh questions about NATO’s readiness and resolve.
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This is The Wall Street Journal article from August 6, 2026 that the above Deutsche Welle article is referencing. DW did so without linking WSJ directly; I had to go find it manually, but fortunately a number of outlets reported on it.
The original WSJ report is far more nuanced than this headline might indicate, and talks about the possibility of a Russian attack on NATO over the coming years. One of the more credible things it said is
Putin’s goal in attacking NATO during a continuing war with Ukraine, if it happens, would be to fracture the alliance, the U.S. officials said. “The question mark is how the United States would respond in that case,” said Heather Conley, senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, on a possible Russian incursion. “It has always been a goal [of Russia’s] to challenge the credibility of NATO and to separate the United States from its allies.”
It’s a good article. For those who’d like to read the original, here are the links:
U.S. Intel Finds Putin Could Test NATO’s Resolve With Limited Incursion – The Wall Street Journal (behind paywall)
Archive link – there are known problems with the site but it has the content; use at your own discretion
any article with a hypothetical in the headline is ABSOLUTE GARBAGE and I refuse to read them.
Russia COULD attack NATO next month … or it could disintegrate tomorrow just like the USSR
Do you understand the difference between the two forms of could used below?:
In theory, I, a regular person, could put in a lot of time, effort, and money, and become an Olympic athlete.
I am an Olympic athlete. I am set to compete in the Olympics tomorrow. I’ve regularly placed in the top levels of my sport. I could win a gold medal tomorrow.
English is not my first language but I do understand the difference, I know it’s not the same use of the conditional tense but I figure it was close enough to make a gag about my point.
Press sensationalism is something I’ve noticed has gotten significantly worse in the last few years
DW is one of the few news sources I still trust, but this article is a ball of nothing. A news source, reporting on a story by a less reputable and much more biased source not listing the original report or what is based on.
…
need I say more?
This isn’t a language issue. The two forms I’m contrasting use the same definition of “could.” But there is a world of difference between:
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A scenario which is uncertain, but real information indicates there is a decent chance of happening. (The “could” used in the article.)
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A scenario which theoretically could happen, but is unlikely and there is no particular evidence available that the scenario is likely. (The “could” you’re using in your hypothetical about Russia disintegrating.)
An infinite number of things are theoretically possible. The article isn’t some baseless speculation saying, “hypothetically, there’s nothing in the laws of physics preventing Russia from invading NATO.” The article is instead saying, “while the intelligence is still uncertain, intelligence indicates a substantial probability of Russia invading NATO territory.”
It’s an issue of probability. The article is probably talking about a scenario with a 30% chance of happening in the next year, a scenario that has real evidence suggesting it’s likely in the near-term. You’re raising a scenario that probably has less than a 1% chance of occurring in the next year, one backed by pure speculation with no evidence at all behind it.
Intelligence is never certain. That doesn’t mean it’s useless.
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loosing war
Opens another front
Surely this will fix things
This doesn’t make any sense. NATO is much stronger than it was before the war. Russia is much weaker.
The Baltic States started the war isolated, partially surrounded by Russia. Today they sit in a NATO lake that can not only support the Baltics, but threaten St Petersburg.
Russia would have to defend a front stretching from the Black sea to the Arctic sea.
Even if the US declined to help, Russia starts in a position of great weakness. And worse still, everyone knows it.
Putin needs a defeat from NATO, not from Ukraine alone. If he loses to the biggest military alliance of the world, he might be able to somewhat sell it to the public on the home front. It would also play right into the propaganda they’ve been spewing that Russia is fighting the collective West.
It’s probably seriously frustrating for Putin to keep poking NATO with drones or other stuff and not get anybody retaliating.
not getting a reaction when he annexed crimea in 2014 was exactly what got us into the current situation
this doesn’t make any sense.
Agreed, but if I had a dollar for every time the world did something stupid and non-sensical I would be emperor of Earth.
Non-sensical to you or non-sensical to the people in power?
Russia’s invasion if Ukraine , for example, makes perfect sense if you’re a dictator surrounded by yes-men blowing smoke up your ass about your amazing military strength for years (while they take the military money and spend it on yachts in the Mediterranean)
I really doubt Putin would make this particular mistake twice though
blowing smoke up your ass about your amazing military strength for years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Khasham
Can they hide that?
The paranoid schizophrenic who chopped a stranger’s head off on a bus, unprovoked, thought he was reasonable - a demon intent on acts of unspeakable evil had to be destroyed. :/
Yes, and humans with rabies will refuse to drink, even though they need water to survive. Decisions made under literal medical delusions aren’t stupid or nonsensical, they’re misinformed and inherently alogical.
The point is it felt reasonable at the time to the individual.
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It makes a lot of sense. You’re ignoring what a realistic action and response would look like.
The goal wouldn’t be to conquer large swathes of NATO territory. The goal would be to test the integrity of the NATO alliance, and to see if the Russian sympathizer sitting in the White House will renege on the US’s obligations.
Imagine Putin sends a few hundred troops over the border and seizes a small amount of land. NATO is not going to use that as an excuse to launch a total war against Russia. Sure, if the full might of the Russian army comes storming into Poland, NATO would let loose everything we have. But a limited incursion like in Georgia? If NATO is living up to its promises, sufficient force would be deployed to drive them out. There would be no need to launch a total war.
This would be a way to test the NATO alliance at relatively low cost and risk. We don’t actually know how Trump would respond to this. He could very well say, “not our problem” and refuse to render aid. If he did command the US military to defend NATO territory, then the cost to Russia would be small. A few hundred casualties in a war that’s caused hundreds of thousands. A rounding error. A small price to pay.
But imagine what Putin gains if Trump doesn’t offer assistance against even a small incursion. NATO’s guarantees will have proven fruitless. Even if someone more friendly to NATO gets elected after Trump, the promise will still be broken. Every NATO member from then on knows that the NATO guarantees cannot be relied upon. A guarantee that is subject to the whims of which American political party is in power is not a guarantee that nations can rely on for their national defense.
and to see if the Russian sympathizer sitting in the White House will renege on the US’s obligations
That bus has already left the station, and the other NATO countries know it. The only open question is how weak Putin will have to be before Trump flip-flops so that he can still be on what he perceives to be the winning side.
If he does send a few hundred to steal some land, and gets pushed out, its not simply a matter of small price to pay, it could potentially change the entire landscape of the Ukraine war by changing how other countries support them. Its a pretty big gamble that they’ll do nothing.
The opposite could also happen. Countries facing direct threats to their own territory are less able to provide military aid.
I think that would be less likely. They’ll see that the threat can be neutered via Ukraine and turn to them rather than simply wait it out which would result in a higher likelyhood of another attempt.
Are they specialised in this new type of war, though? I saw something about Americans being wiped out in simulated exercises against Ukrainian drone operators - and the Russians will be bringing that kind of experience to someone who has only been learning in classrooms from Ukrainians.
Although they did initially get “wiped out”, but (from the article):
by repeating the training scenario throughout the two-week exercise, US Army troops got better at figuring out how to disperse and hide from the drones while using countermeasures such as electronic warfare.
Which is the point of these exercises. It’ll still take time to modify doctrine and train, but the US is now more practically informed on this type of warfare.
This is a half-formed thought but Russia is quite strong in exactly one way: nuclear warhead count. That doesn’t help him resupply Crimea but perhaps he’s trying to change the scope or scale of the conflict in a way that would make this strength more relevant?
Please recall that the CIA and like organizations have been doing this for about 70 years. It’s how they get their budgets increased. Their massive black budgets that we are not allowed to know about.
Recommend “Legacy of Ashes” by Weiner. The CIA hates this book, and used to specifically attack it on their website. The absolute best possible endorsement, in my opinion.
No matter how bad you think it is, it’s worse.
According to a Wall Street Journal report citing US intelligence
Yeah OK, you can stop reading there. Two of the biggest propaganda outlets in the western world, both hawkish, would fucking love an open war with Russia and have been saying it’s imminent for decades.
This scenario is a right wing fantasy.
People were scoffing at US warnings that Russia might launch an attack against Ukraine back in 2022.
It feels illogical for Putin to attack NATO but he would rather lose to “The West ™” than against little Ukraine.
There’s this small, almost imperceptible difference between the US back in 2022 and the US today: US in 2022 were a partner you could somewhat trust. US in 2026 are a monarchy with a child-raping turd as a king.
That’s a bold strategy cotton…
I personally feel as the Ukraine conflict drags on Russia will throw a hail Mary, get its ass completely kicked and Putin either tops himself or is off’d by his own.
I look forward to seeing a red stain on the streets of Moscow knowing it used to be Putin
That man hasn’t walked on a Moscow street for years
Not gonna lie, I kinda hope they do.
Kick their fucking asses once and for all.
NATO should have made a no fly zone over Ukraine years ago. Call their pissant little bluff. Red lines my asshole.
A no-fly zone isn’t just “we make their planes go away”. It means you need to fly there. And that means you need to take out their AA, and their airborne radar outside the zone, and their ground based radar. You need to take out their ability to fly, so you need to kill the airfields, which means taking out the close range AA at those fields.
To establish a no-fly zone, you need to bomb the ever living shit out of Russia, not just inside Ukraine but deep within Russian borders too. The 2011 no-fly zone over Libya involved attacking 600 tanks, for example (insert turret-toss joke here), and thousands of ground-attack sorties.
Make no mistake, a “NATO no-fly zone” is just a declaration of war, without any boots crossing the border at ground level.
Not that I think we shouldn’t, but it’s not exactly easy
What good is a no fly zone over Ukraine if the only thing left in the airspace is mostly Drones without ID? If I remember Russia launches most of its long range missiles from way behind the front already.
It will work as long as the USA can’t veto NATO actions. Which I’m sure they will try to.
How can that be enforced? Can Nato evade S400 rockets?
Yes.
Analysts cited in the report suggest Vladimir Putin may seek to open a new front rather than risk being remembered as the leader who lost Ukraine
Does Putin play Weiqi/Baduk/Go? A common strategy when a player is losing in one part of the board is for them to open up new “fronts” in other areas of the board, hoping that they’re more successful in one of these other areas and that this will yield a new advantage in the original area they had been losing in. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t; what it usually comes down to is whether they’re able to “read” the game further ahead than the opponent, in the hopes that the opponent won’t see how developments in Area B will affect Area A.
The big difference here is the other front is another player. If they actually do strike NATO they are basically putting down another board and play with another player without additional piece.
