By Tom Stevenson, London Review of Books, 10/8/26

If Russia Wins: A Scenario 
by Carlo Masala, translated by Olena Ebel and Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp.
Atlantic, 120 pp., £9.99, August 2025, 978 1 80546 574 4

Atlantic Resolve: The War for Estonia 
by Thomas Newman and John Pierson.
Amazon, 224 pp., £7.55, March 2025, 9798313464589

At Narva​ in north-east Estonia, Hermann Castle, a reconstructed Teutonic fort, sits directly opposite Ivangorod Fortress on the Narva river. The two castles are only about 150 metres apart, but between them lies the border between Nato territory and Russia. In the 18th century the Great Northern War between Sweden and Russia began at Narva. The German empire and the Bolsheviks fought there in 1918. Next to the affronting fortifications there is a modern road bridge built by the Soviet Union in the late 1950s to replace an older bridge blown up first by the retreating Red Army in 1941 and again by the retreating German army in 1944. It is still called Most Druzhby, the friendship bridge, though recently druzhba has been in short supply. Russia closed the bridge to cars in 2024 and last year metal gates were erected on the Estonian side.

Narva, a mostly Russian-speaking border town inside the European Union on the main road from Tallinn to St Petersburg, might have been dreamed up as the perfect location for a conflict between Russia and the West. Since the failure of Ukraine’s counter-offensive in 2023, there has been plenty of conjecture about future wars with Russia, and Narva has been one of the places earmarked as a potential Sudetenland. Earlier this year, a group on the Telegram app called ‘Narva People’s Republic’ began posting fantasy descriptions of a pro-Russia militia taking over the city and declaring a breakaway people’s republic along the lines of the Luhansk People’s Republic, formally annexed in 2022. The Telegram group attracted dozens of articles about Russian hybrid threats to Estonia and was briefly a cause of concern in European security circles. But the Narva People’s Republic was an obvious hoax. There was no embryonic separatist movement organising online.

Another imagined Narva is at the centre of Carlo Masala’s book, or ‘scenario’, about a future Russian invasion of Nato territory. Masala, a professor at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich and an occasional commentator on security matters for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, opens his story in 2028. Ukraine has been forced to sign an unequal peace with Russia that includes handing over slabs of land in eastern Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelensky has resigned and Ukraine has been ‘plunged into chaos’. Vladimir Putin has resigned too – though in his case in the wake of victory – and been replaced by President Obmanshchikov (a name with an echo of the Russian obmanshchik, ‘deceiver’). In Europe, far-right political parties celebrate. Worst of all, the US pulls large numbers of troops out of Europe and packs them off to East Asia. The time is ripe for the Kremlin to plot its next move, which turns out to be an occupation of Narva.

The opening scene is not set in Narva, however, but in Mali. A group of civilians is captured and driven somewhere in North Africa to be put on boats heading to Europe. The intention is to draw Germany into moving its frigates from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean in anticipation of another migrant crisis. Xi Jinping has agreed to create a diversion by landing men on the Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea, which causes the government of the Philippines to ask the US to send in an aircraft carrier. Russian forces move on Narva under the pretext of protecting the rights of Russian speakers. When news arrives that the Russian army has crossed into Estonia, Nato is in disarray. Unlike in 2022, US intelligence doesn’t know what’s going on even after it has started, let alone before.

Nato faces a big decision: should it assemble forces to repel the attack? And if so, who will die for Narva? A Russian diplomat visits the White House to argue that Washington surely can’t care all that much about a small Estonian town. Meanwhile, a Russian nuclear-armed submarine surfaces in the strait between Greenland and Canada. The US president – unnamed, but presumably Trump in his final year in office – is happy to let the Russians have their way. Poland, the UK and the Baltic states are gung-ho about pushing Russia out of Estonia but Southern European countries are reluctant to fight. Without the US, some Nato states argue, they can’t defend themselves from Russia’s ballistic missiles. Public opinion is against another war with Russia. To make matters worse, ‘high-ranking Western politicians’ keep pointing out the complexity of Eastern European history. So the transatlantic alliance that ‘guaranteed peace, freedom and economic prosperity’ is revealed to be a sham. Putin and Lukashenko appear at a ceremonial public event where Obmanshchikov declares the ‘return’ of Narva to the Russian Federation. Xi thinks that ‘Chinese domination of the world is within reach.’

Though it is presented as the kind of scenario planning that goes on in military staff offices – imagining plausible futures and drawing up strategies – Masala’s approach is closer to that of a television scriptwriter imagining Nato meetings. Mr Secretary General, might the military commanders be allowed to give their assessments? ‘Gentlemen, please.’ Wise army officers are ignored by foolish political leaders. Russia is crafty and pitiless. The EU is impotent and the US brash and unlettered. Russian rearmament is an obvious sign of impending aggression, whereas European rearmament is prudent deterrence. The book’s reception was predictably positive – it was Alastair Campbell’s book of the year for 2025 – thanks to its irresistible offer of conventional wisdom dressed up as provocation. ‘What makes Masala’s scenario so compelling – and unnerving’, the New Statesman said, is that ‘it is so plausible.’

Masala wrote the book as a protest against the idea of a ceasefire in the Ukraine war. For him, the underlying problem is the weakness of European societies, which he believes are unwilling to ‘consistently face down Russia’. Apart from Poland and the Baltic states – classed as ‘resilient’ societies – Masala’s Europe refuses to notice that it is being attacked by Russian ‘hybrid warfare’. Western Europeans are even opposed to reintroducing universal conscription. This is why, despite the relatively negative picture of Washington he presents, Masala wants US forces to remain in Europe. The true enemies are at home, on both sides of European politics, whether victims of Russian disinformation or simply traitors (in Germany, as in Britain, critical perspectives on national security matters are often suspected to be foreign influence operations). The great fear of a Russian victory in Ukraine is not the price paid by Ukraine but the potential fracturing of the holy transatlantic alliance.

In an afterword to the book, Masala takes aim at ‘fearmongers’ in the West who insist on taking into account Russia’s thousands of thermonuclear weapons. It goes unmentioned that in 2022 US intelligence assessed that there was a 50 per cent chance Russia would use nuclear weapons if it started losing in Ukraine. Masala’s prescription is to ignore that possibility and subject European societies to the usual conservative medicine of increased military budgets and lower social spending. As usual there is no consideration of whether this reallocation of resources might destroy what it claims to preserve.

Masala’s book isn’t the only recent example of war fiction designed to raise the alarm about Russia. In their self-published Atlantic Resolve, John Pierson and Thomas Newman, two US army veterans, imagine a similar invasion of Estonia. In their narrative, the Ukraine war ended in an unstable ceasefire forced on Zelensky by the US. As in Masala’s scenario, Putin is removed from the picture (he succumbs to a stroke offstage) and is replaced by Igor Belov, the owner of a Russian arms company that profited handsomely from the war. The West has made an ‘overall pivot to isolationism’: the US has reduced troop levels in Europe and Germany is again buying Russian gas. Seizing the opportunity, Belov lights on a plan to use Estonia to break ‘Nato’s hold over our rightful sphere’.

The operation is launched in February 2033, when the handful of US soldiers stationed in Estonia have their plans to visit the saunas of Tallinn thwarted by the arrival of 300,000 Russian troops. Russia calculates that the US won’t care enough about Estonia to fight, but it has underestimated American mettle. The Europeans come off worse. Baltic leaders are brave and clear-sighted but subject to forces beyond their control (‘It is fortunate,’ a cackling FSB chief remarks, ‘that the Nato governments with the most foresight are often the weakest’). The UK, ‘always competent and reliable’, agrees to send four thousand paratroopers to Tallinn but they will take too long to arrive. Germany and France decline to commit troops and the Hungarian prime minister thinks Estonia deserves to be invaded.

As in the Masala scenario, Russia envisions a bloodless coup de main. Instead, US ground forces make quick work of the first wave of Russian soldiers and then dig in to stall the invasion until help can arrive. The US president orders a huge airlift of troops and equipment to Europe in ‘the greatest display of logistical prowess the modern world had ever seen’. The war is won through the grit of individual American heroes, who hold the line until the cavalry arrives in the form of the US air force, which beats back Russia’s air support and wipes out its missile defence network. The rest of Nato (except Hungary, Turkey and Slovakia) is heartened by an unambiguous display of American power and joins the fight to hand Russia a humiliating defeat.

Pierson and Newman have lifted their title from the name of a US-led military operation launched in 2014 and still ongoing: Operation Atlantic Resolve was designed to bolster Nato’s eastern flank following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. The title gives the game away when it comes to the book’s tone and style, as does the back cover, imprinted with le drapeau de l’OTAN. ‘The Russians’ emerge from the snow as manifestations of the malicious world-soul, an ‘alien race’ of starvers and plunderers. You can detect the influence of social media discourse about the Ukraine war: in English, Ukrainians often use the term ‘orc’ to refer to Russians (in Ukrainian, a homophobic slur is more common). ‘Can’t they just be normal?’ a US private asks. A fellow soldier explains: ‘This kind of shit is pretty much the story of Russian history.’

At its core the book is a fantasy of American salvation of Europe. Whatever strife might exist in Congress about riding to the old world’s rescue, in the end the US president chooses to scramble the F-35s. Russia’s army of professional orcs is ruthless, but no match for the Americans. The Russian president stages an ICBM test with a nuclear warhead, but after that the threat of nuclear weapons recedes. Better to have a straightforward story of American soldiers driving Russia from the field than a bloody stalemate in the devastated bocage of eastern Ukraine.

Successive​ Estonian governments have worked to present the country as one of the success stories of the post-Soviet world – a pioneer of ‘e-residency’, flat taxes and cybersecurity conferences. Yet the country now finds itself the backdrop for the imaginings of sympathetic war-fi writers. Estonian politicians aren’t delighted about this. The former president Kersti Kaljulaid politely dismissed Masala’s Narva scenario as unhelpful. Estonia has tried to be the most pliable of US allies. It supported the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, is reflexively pro-Israel and was quick to endorse the US-Israeli attack on Iran. Apparently that’s no protection against lurid portrayals of national disaster.

The war-fi phenomenon may seem puerile, but these books are only embellishments of the dire warnings about Russia regularly relayed in national newspapers. In February, the minister of defence for the Netherlands, Ruben Brekelmans, predicted that Russia would be in a position to move large numbers of troops towards Nato’s borders within a year. British generals, both retired and in uniform, continue to make similar statements. The idea that Russia, despite being bogged down in Ukraine, is already considering another adventure further north isn’t wholly unsupported: its military has repeatedly violated the airspace of the Baltic states and Poland (sometimes with drones, occasionally with MiGs and Tupolevs). But these incursions are invariably met with an air policing response from Nato.

Newspapers also like to report on more elaborate hypotheticals. Die Welt recently published the results of a war game conducted by the Helmut-Schmidt University of the German Armed Forces, in which ‘Russia’, under the pretext of a humanitarian crisis in Kaliningrad, successfully seized Marijampole in Lithuania with 15,000 troops. These results attracted a lot of attention, though no one mentioned that the point of publicising war games in the media is to lend credibility to political arguments. War games are useful for staff training, and for testing plans under the harsh light of hostile review. Military staffs around the world are fond of them and participants seem to find them very diverting. But their outcomes are heavily influenced by their starting assumptions and by the prejudices of participants about the way putative adversaries think. Some are straightforwardly designed to be lost, with Western forces defeated: an effective basis on which to campaign for increased military spending.

The current trend for war games springs from the same source as the taste for ‘plausible’ war-fi. Over the past year, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington has conducted more than seventy war games simulating Chinese blockades and invasions of Taiwan, yielding the remarkable discovery that there would be large numbers of casualties and that a ‘Ukraine strategy’ – in which the US supplies Taiwan but doesn’t join the fight – would not work on water. Last year, Sky News and Tortoise produced a radio series, The Wargame, which simulated a Russian attack on Britain, conducted for mysterious reasons, that was principally a vehicle for bemoaning Britain’s missing military capabilities. The series has now been remade as a TV documentary starring Michael Gove, Nicola Sturgeon and Christopher Steele.

In light of admonitions that it is once again 1938 in Europe, it’s worth noting that the official assessment of Nato intelligence agencies is that Russia is not in a position to attack any Nato country. American intelligence has briefed about the possibility of a cyber attack, or even a ‘limited incursion’ into Nato territory in the next few years. But in June the supreme allied commander Europe, General Alexus Grynkewich, was asked about the risk of war in the Baltics. ‘I’ve watched the intelligence very closely,’ he said. ‘Russia is not looking for a conflict.’ Yet as long as the war in Ukraine continues, the risk of a larger war in Europe remains. From Russia’s perspective, Nato is financing and supplying the destruction of Russian army units in Ukraine and is providing intelligence and communications networks that allow for Ukrainian strikes inside Russia. Despite the risk of a general war it would entail, Russia could decide to attack Nato on a different front. But Nato security types often want to have it both ways: should Russia win in Ukraine, we’re told, it will be more likely to attack the Baltic states; yet when Russia gets bogged down in eastern Ukraine and struggles even to seize small towns in the Donbas, we’re told that this too increases the chances of further adventures.

The strength of these fictional accounts is that they accurately depict the frontier between Europe and Russia as being in an unstable equilibrium. In the long term, Russia is clearly a military threat to the Baltic states, though no longer to Poland. But the war-fi accounts all conveniently ascribe this to dynamics endogenous to Russia, which figures as a metastasising cancer for which one is either prepared or not. The risk of war derives from the existence, or non-existence, of Obmanshchikov or Belov or Putin. Put aside the fact that Baltic governments haven’t always been models of defensive restraint themselves (in May, Lithuania’s foreign minister, Kestutis Budrys, threatened to ‘show the Russians that we are capable of breaking into their little fortress that they have built in Kaliningrad’). Is it credible that no responsibility for the tensions lies with Nato’s own actions, or for that matter with the original decision to extend the American empire in Europe to an unsustainable point? And is there no better solution than a very long militarised border secured by elaborate demonstrations of commitment to small Eastern European towns?

Since April 2025, Germany has stationed its 45th Panzer brigade in Lithuania. By 2035 Germany plans to nearly double the size of its military forces and become ‘the strongest conventional army in Europe’. Polish rearmament continues. But the paradigm is still defined by the American military presence in Europe. In early May, the US caused a brief panic when it said it would withdraw five thousand troops from Germany. But days later Trump announced that an additional five thousand soldiers would be sent to Poland. The Pentagon is currently conducting a review of the US military posture in Europe, which has security officials in Brussels on edge. But the current National Defence Authorisation Act, signed by Trump in December, mandates that the US must keep at least 76,000 troops deployed across the continent, at least for now. Last July, the Pentagon significantly increased the number of B61-12 tactical nuclear bombs stationed in European bases.

In 2024, the defence ministers of the Baltic states announced a joint plan to set up a 1600-kilometre line of ‘anti-mobility installations’ along the borders with Russia and Kaliningrad. Dragons’ teeth, anti-tank ditches and bunkers wouldn’t be enough to prevent a ground invasion but they might buy a little time. In June, Poland lodged a request with Washington that a permanent US military base be established in the country (in addition to the existing US army garrison at Poznan). Last spring, Poland, Finland and the Baltic states all announced they would withdraw from the Ottawa Treaty, which bans anti-personnel landmines. Estonia has adopted an approximation of the Finnish conscription model with mandatory military service for young men, though in practice there are plenty of indefinite deferments on offer. Latvia reintroduced conscription in 2023 against the preferences of its defence ministry and most of its Russian-speaking minority. Poland, having wasted some money on a frigate in the Baltic Sea, is now talking of developing ‘nuclear potential’. In February the Estonian foreign minister, Margus Tsahkna, said the prospect of deploying Nato nuclear weapons on its territory should not be ruled out.

An obvious objection to the war-fi genre is that there are quite enough wars to be getting on with without inventing fictional ones. Most of them are started by a country that the genre doesn’t consider dangerous. There is no market for a book titled ‘If America Wins’, or for a fictional account of how the most aggressive state in the world, if finally successful in Iran, will feel emboldened to take on Cuba and Greenland (should the latest deal to site two US bases there fall through, or fail to satisfy Trump’s appetite). Rather than writing about real aggression conducted or facilitated by the state of which you’re a citizen, you can always tell stories about imaginary aggression by designated enemies. What would we think of Russian authors writing fictional scenarios of American aggression that are really veiled political arguments for diverting more resources to Russian security forces? We might hope that instead they would oppose their own government’s criminal aggression and, to whatever extent possible, advocate for efforts to reduce the risk of catastrophe.