Russia vs. Nato: which side would win in a war?

Donald Trump is committed to Nato and will not pull the US out of the alliance once he takes office next year, UK Defence Secretary John Healey has said.

The election of the former president, who has been a vocal critic of Nato in the past, has sparked alarm in member countries as well as in Ukraine, which fears he could cut military aid and force Kyiv into an "unfavourable peace deal" with Russia, said Voice of America (VoA).

Speaking at a campaign rally earlier this year, Trump said he would allow Russia to do "whatever the hell they want" to Nato countries who are not meeting their responsibilities on defence spending.

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It comes as new Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte warned Russia was conducting an "intensifying campaign of hybrid attacks across our allied territories, interfering directly in our democracies, sabotaging industry and committing violence", said Politico.

"This shows that the shift of the frontline in this war is no longer solely in Ukraine. Increasingly, the frontline is moving beyond borders to the Baltic region, to Western Europe and even to the high north."

'A new geopolitical reality'

Nato was described as "brain-dead" by French President Emmanuel Macron in 2019 when he said there were signs that the US was "turning its back on us", said The Economist. Then Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 confronted the Western alliance with a "new geopolitical reality" and a threat "previously thought consigned to the past: a full-out conventional land war on the European continent", said the Kyiv Independent.

Last year, the respected Institute for the Study of War think tank warned that Putin wanted "to prepare Russia for a potential future large-scale conventional war" with Nato. This came after Russian troops were moved towards the northwest of the country where it shares borders with Finland, Latvia and Estonia.

Russia's restructuring of its military and movement of its forces, and remarks from Putin himself, were indicative of the Kremlin's "hostile intent" towards the alliance and posed a "credible – and costly – threat to Western security".

In response to the threat posed by Putin on its eastern border, Nato has scrambled to present a united front. Its member states have plied Kyiv with weapons and enforced the most severe economic sanctions ever imposed on a major economy. But they have wavered over Ukraine's bid to join the alliance and remain divided over further financial and military support for the battered country.

Nato's military power

A mutual assistance clause sits at the heart of the security alliance, which was formed in 1949 with the aim of countering the risk of a Soviet attack on allied territory. Article 5 of Nato's North Atlantic Treaty says that an attack on one ally is considered an attack on all member states – which presents an obstacle for Ukraine's membership while it remains at war with Russia.

A Nato pledge asks members to spend 2% of gross domestic product on defence, though less than a third of members meet this target.

Nato's biggest player, the US, spends almost as much on defence as the next 10 spenders in the world combined. Its total in 2023 was about $916 billion, according to Statista – nearly 40% of the total military spending worldwide that year. The UK sits in sixth place, with spending of $74.9 billion (£60 billion).

Nato's resources have been bolstered by the accession of two new member states since the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine: Finland, which joined in April 2023, and Sweden, which was admitted in March after a two-year struggle to overcome vetoes from Hungary and Turkey.

Sweden in particular has "a large defence industry and an advanced military" and since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, its government "has more than doubled defence spending and is on course to spend a little over 2% of GDP on the military this year", said the United States Institute of Peace think-tank. However, the biggest contribution the two new members bring to the table is "geostrategic", their location shoring up the alliance's exposed northeastern flank and shielding the Baltic states, regarded as most vulnerable to future Russian aggression.

Russia's military power

Despite Russian forces' well-publicised struggles in Ukraine, their overall military capability is considerable. The country went from the fifth largest defence spender in the world in 2021 to the third in 2022 (behind the US and China), with a jump of more than £20 billion.

It has 1.32 million active military personnel, according to Statista, but only about 4,814 military aircraft compared with Nato's combined 22,308, and 781 military ships compared to Nato's 2,258. And although Russia does outnumber Nato for tanks (14,777 to 11,390), in terms of armoured vehicles overall its stock of 161,382 is dwarfed by Nato's 849,801.

The two forces are evenly matched in terms of known nuclear capability, with the Nato nuclear powers – the US, the UK and France – able to field 5,759 nuclear warheads to Russia's 5,889.

Many experts believe the country's military effectiveness was dented by the disbanding of the Wagner Group after its abortive mutiny last year. In the aftermath, the UK Ministry of Defence intelligence update reported that it could take Russia "up to 10 years to restore its military capabilities to their former strength". 

But "signs of Russian vulnerability offer no grounds for Western complacency", according to a research paper published by policy institute Chatham House. The bloody conflict in Ukraine "has shown it can absorb losses and maintain tactical-operational credibility despite strategic failures".

How likely is a war between Nato and Russia?

Despite his bellicose rhetoric, Putin has little serious appetite for escalating the hostilities. He knows a Russia-Nato conflict would be "political and military suicide", said The Guardian's foreign affairs commentator, Simon Tisdall, last summer.

The lukewarm response to Ukraine's quest to join Nato makes it clear where members stand on the prospect of direct conflict with Russia, too, said The Telegraph. Nato "would effectively be at war with Russia from the moment of Ukrainian accession", which has now been put off to some as-yet-vague point "after the war".

There is also the question of how Nato's untested "mutual assistance" agreement would play out in the event of an attack by Russia on a member state. The partnership is "heavily dependent on the United States acting as first responder", Stephen M. Walt wrote on Foreign Policy, and "there are powerful structural forces gradually pulling Europe and the United States apart".

"The most obvious source of strain is the shifting distribution of world power" since Nato's founding in 1949 in response to what seemed like a very real threat of Soviet world domination. Now, "the idea that the Russian army is going to launch a blitzkrieg into Poland and drive to the English Channel is laughable".

That's good news, in one sense, but it also means that Europe "no longer occupies pride of place among US strategic interests", and member states are all too conscious that no one represents this weakening of the transatlantic alliance better than Donald Trump.