U.S. leaders and their European allies are unprepared for the ways in which Putin is poised to wage war in Ukraine and the Baltic. The Russian military is well-positioned to launch a short-notice conventional war in Ukraine and a hybrid war in the Baltic States, the opposite of what Western leaders seem to expect in each theater. NATO leaders increasingly warn of the threat of a conventional invasion of the Baltic States (or even Western Europe).¹ But Russian ground forces are not deployed or organized to initiate a short-notice conventional war in that region. They have, however, redeployed and reorganized...

Russia’s Western Military District (WMD) is responsible for confronting NATO and maintaining Russian influence in former Soviet space, with a particular focus on Ukraine and protecting the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad between Poland and Lithuania The WMD has the most combat units of any military district. It includes the 1^st Guards Tank Army and the 20^th and 6^th Combined-Arms Armies concentrated near Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and the Ukrainian and Belarusian borders respectively. The WMD also commands the Russian ground forces in Transnistria, Moldova ostensibly performing a peace-keeping mission.²¹ The Kremlin leverages this small force to sustain Russian influence in Moldova...

U S policymakers must recognize that the Kremlin will not likely deploy conventional forces as its initial form of aggression in the Baltics. It will rather employ a combination of subversive tactics before it accepts the full costs associated with conventional combat. Russia demonstrated this timing and phasing during the initial irregular invasion of Eastern Ukraine and subsequent deployment of ground units to combat. The flurry of concern over the possibility of a Russian invasion of the Baltics launched by the 2016 RAND study generated a positive initial response — the stationing of mechanized battalions in the Baltic States. But...