Russia is too stretched in Ukraine to risk a war with Nato and will fall back on sabotage and intimidation instead, security researcher Eric Woods argues in Riddle.

Even a limited clash would leave Russia open to attack across its borders with Finland, Poland and Ukraine and to air strikes on strategic targets Ukraine has failed to destroy, Woods, an independent researcher and consultant on security issues, writes in an analysis published on September 2. Moscow has real grievances and wants to punish the alliance for acting as a "quasi-belligerent" in Ukraine, he says, but the military balance limits what it can do about them.

The argument runs against a string of warnings from European governments that Moscow is preparing to test the alliance directly. Czech counterintelligence chief Michal Koudelka said on September 20 that a limited incursion into Nato territory could come in "months, not years", and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told parliament on September 17 that Russia planned hybrid drone and missile strikes on Ukraine's backers, including Poland.

Why Moscow might be tempted

From the Kremlin's point of view, Woods writes, an attack would be a way to restore deterrence after years of deepening Western involvement in Ukraine, which has grown from limited arms deliveries and intelligence sharing into a partnership behind regular large-scale strikes on Russian cities. Ukraine could not build those weapons at scale without safe havens in Western countries, he argues, and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has gone as far as saying European nations are "directly participating" in attacks on Russia. Moscow's conclusion that only a harsher response can stop them is "a classic instance of the security dilemma," Woods writes.

After four and a half years of war Russia has troops with modern combat experience and more capacity for complex missile and drone strikes on rear areas, so an assault by its most seasoned units backed by deep missile strikes could win early victories. But Nato is better prepared than it was in 2021.

"Gambling on limited early gains in a war with NATO would court disaster for Russia in the short, medium, and long term," Woods writes.

Not enough men

The main constraint is the size of the army, Woods argues. Putin said at a Kremlin event in June 2026 that the fighting contingent in Ukraine numbered only 700,000 men. He has raised the army's authorised strength on paper to more than 1.5mn soldiers, and the same decree allows for roughly 800,000 more civilian posts. By Putin's own count, fewer than half the troops allocated to the army are fighting in Ukraine, and Woods says that would not be enough to take on Nato while the war goes on.

Russia has built military infrastructure along the Finnish border and in Belarus that could threaten large industrial sites and airbases in Europe, and Finnish officials estimate it could now station about 80,000 troops on the Finnish frontier. Woods finds little open-source reporting of preparations for larger operations at these sites, however, and argues that with commercial satellite imagery now widespread, any serious build-up on Nato's borders would probably be spotted early, as it was before the invasion of Ukraine.

Poland's army has an on-paper strength of about 220,000, although Polish sources put its actual peacetime front-line contingent at 65,000-70,000, and a country of 36.5mn people could mobilise far more given time, as Ukraine has done. Finland, which relies on trained reservists, has more than 800,000 of them on paper - a figure Woods says should be treated with caution - and could still field hundreds of thousands of soldiers quickly. It has integrated fast into alliance infrastructure since joining and, with Sweden, is drawing up plans to counter Ukrainian-style drone attacks.

Finland as a staging ground

Finland's accession is the least-explored part of the problem, Woods argues, because it puts key parts of Russia at risk in the same way Russia can threaten Ukraine's big cities. In a war, bases in Murmansk, Leningrad Oblast and near the Baltic borders would be vital logistics hubs, and one-way attack drones combined with Finland's access to advanced stealth aircraft would put much of that infrastructure in range. Russia would face much more than Ukrainian drone strikes on civilian targets such as Wildberries warehouses, he writes, including attacks on the homes of senior government figures and on the factories that assemble important missiles.

"NATO would suffer deadly air attacks, but it has the means to destroy or disable key production facilities that Ukraine simply does not possess," Woods writes.

Even a successful blitzkrieg against the Baltic states would only deepen Russia's security problems, he argues. Reinforcements from the rest of the alliance would all but guarantee a Russian defeat in a conventional war over the medium term, and a Nato-Russia war would hand Ukraine some of its best chances to retake territory.

Pressure short of war

Instead, Woods expects Moscow to rely on measures that are unlikely to stop support for Ukraine in any meaningful way. Russia is almost certain to keep hiring people online to carry out sabotage, but such recruits can manage reconnaissance and similar tasks and are far less skilled than the professionals behind operations such as the Skripal poisonings. The attacks are not strategically decisive and do nothing like the damage Ukraine can inflict on Russia with Western help.

Moscow has so far not answered Western seizures of shadow fleet vessels or the unexplained sinkings off Europe's coast of ships linked to Russia's arms trade. Woods says it has some legal grounds to call the seizures illegal, since the ships are under the sanctions of individual states rather than the UN, and Putin's threat to respond in kind is one of the more immediate steps Russia may take to restore what it regards as deterrence.

More attacks on European officials, such as the alleged plots to assassinate defence officials helping Ukraine, are another option. Russia has so far failed to match the attacks it has suffered in Moscow, and European officials could prove easier targets than Ukrainian ones in Kyiv, Woods writes. Moscow's pressure campaigns of the past decade have rarely been read the way it intended and have often backfired, but he expects them to continue for as long as Russian leaders believe they will eventually work.

"Europe can expect continued aggressiveness. The use of military force against NATO countries, however, could prove even more self-defeating for Russia than the invasion of Ukraine in 2022," he concludes.