Unlike Trump, Europe can’t afford to take Putin at his word

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe. 

When it comes to the war in Ukraine, America and Europe stand far apart on many things — not least on who’s to blame for the conflict that’s been raging for three years and how to end it.

At the heart of the dispute are vastly differing calculations of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s overall geopolitical intentions, and whether he’s scheming to reassert Russian influence over a swathe of Europe.

U.S. President Donald Trump regularly gives Putin the benefit of the doubt. But Europeans — especially those living near Russia or who have endured Soviet occupation — do not. They simply cannot afford to let their guard down, said Thomas Nilsson, head of Sweden’s military intelligence service, who talked to POLITICO on the margins of the Munich Security Conference.

According to the sober-minded Nilsson, Sweden has to prepare to face a hostile and unpredictable Russia, especially if Moscow gets its way in Ukraine: While the country has moved some of its military assets away from the Baltics for now, “the moment the war fighting in Ukraine stops or reduces, we’re sure the Russians will come back to our neighborhood,” he said. “They’re already talking about building bases along a new front line with Finland and also up to the Arctic.”

Meanwhile, Russia’s hybrid operations against Sweden haven’t ceased at all: Disinformation campaigns and cyber aggression continue, while recent incidents of cable breakages under the Baltic Sea are being investigated to establish whether the damage was intentional. So far, sabotage hasn’t been confirmed. Still, “we have to raise our awareness on the hybrid field. We see patterns,” Nilsson said.

And earlier this year, Sweden’s top defense officials told their countrymen they needed to mentally prepare for the possibility of war, prompting accusations of alarmism from opposition politicians.

But Sweden isn’t alone in being unnerved. The growing divergence between the U.S. and Europe is preying on the minds of all European defense and intelligence chiefs. And their anxiety only grows each time the U.S. president and his aides play down the Russian threat, seemingly parroting Kremlin talking points, like blaming Kyiv for starting the conflict as Trump did earlier this month — comments that left Ukrainians enraged and Europeans dumbstruck.

Trump also scoffs at the idea that Putin can’t be trusted during negotiations. “I know him very well. Yeah, I think he wants peace. I think he would tell me if he didn’t … I trust him on this subject,” Trump told reporters last week. But as far as most Europeans see it, peace isn’t something high on Putin’s list. He’s used negotiations and bad-faith diplomacy in Ukraine and Syria to outwit and ensnare before, assisted by his able albeit unscrupulous Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov.

“Trustworthy” certainly isn’t how they would describe the Russian leader. And why should they?

In 2014, Putin ferried troops into Crimea and the Donbas after his satrap Viktor Yanukovych was toppled in Ukraine’s color revolution, all the while swearing blind they weren’t his “little green men.” And in 2022, as his armies massed along the Ukrainian border, he brazenly denied he had any intention of launching a full-scale invasion. They were just taking part in military exercises, he said.

But Trump has a track record of taking Putin at his word. During his first term in office, he sided with the Russian leader over the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, dismissing their findings that Russia had meddled in the 2016 presidential election. “President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be,” he said after closed-door talks with Putin in Helsinki.

And this week, while French President Emmanuel Macron was sat by his side, Trump simply waved away the idea that if a peace deal were struck, a European peacekeeping force deployed in Ukraine would need U.S. security guarantees, saying Europe “wouldn’t need much backing.”

Presumably for him, Putin’s word is, again, sufficient.

Understandably, though, it isn’t enough for Europeans — or Ukrainians. Security guarantees mean everything because they can’t overlook Putin’s militaristic history or his determination to restore Russia’s status as a great power, which has largely underpinned his foreign policy since coming to power in 2000.

But for Trump and his supporters, all this is overblown. It’s NATO’s eastward expansion that provoked Russian aggression, Trump said just days before his inauguration this year. And anyway, Russia doesn’t have the capacity to strike against a NATO country beyond Ukraine. “I don’t believe for a second Russia is going to advance a war in any other country right now,” Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin told NBC News on Sunday.

Maybe not right now, but later — yes. That’s Europe’s overriding fear, especially for countries located near Russia, like the Baltic and Nordic states and Poland.

Estonia’s Foreign Intelligence Service already warned that Russia is expanding its armed forces in a way that “prepares for a potential future war with NATO.” Danish intelligence has forecast Russia could be ready to wage a “large-scale war” in Europe within five years. Lithuania’s government has reintroduced military conscription and is ramping up its defense spending to 3.45 percent of gross domestic product. And Latvia’s intelligence service thinks the Kremlin is purposefully developing its capabilities to confront NATO. And, of course, it was fear of Russia that prompted Finland and Sweden to join NATO.

The contrast between these two assessments of Russia’s geopolitical ambitions is stark, and it cuts right to the core of the difference between most of Europe and Trump’s Washington — as well as Putin’s allies like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Slovakia’s Robert Fico.

Orbán is confident that once a deal on Ukraine is reached, it will be all roses — not guns. But that’s not how Nilsson sees it: “In the longer run, I’m not ruling out the possibility that the Russians will decide or calculate they could actually test Article 5,” he told POLITICO, referencing the alliance’s collective defense commitment.

He doesn’t argue that the military threat is imminent — as long as the war rages in Ukraine, Russia doesn’t have the capability to conduct another large-scale military campaign. “They have lost key categories of staff needed to build capacity, and current sanctions [are] making it more difficult and more expensive to build some of the advanced capabilities,” Nilsson said. Nonetheless, “Russia remains the military threat to Sweden.”

From warplanes and warships to nuclear weapons and cyber, Russia still has plenty of assets in the region that it “could use at any given time,” Nilsson said. And he has no doubt that once the war in Ukraine ends, “Russia will reestablish its military presence near Sweden as soon as it can,” and this time it will be “more up to date and more adapted to battlefield experience.”