The West is increasingly preparing for a major war on European soil amid increasing aggression from Russia and its anti-NATO allies.
After three and a half years of devastating conflict, Vladimir Putin is showing no signs of relenting on his military ambitions, and there are growing fears that his target stretches beyond Ukraine.
China’s Xi Jinping has assembled what analysts are calling an ‘Axis of Upheaval’ in Beijing – convening Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in a historic summit of more than 20 non-Western countries designed to isolate Donald Trump.
Analysts are waiting to see whether the trio commit to closer defence relations, in a move that would be a blow for the U.S. President who has recently touted his peacemaking credentials.
But despite the summits in Alaska and the White House, no diplomatic resolution has yet been brokered to end the three and a half year conflict.
Putin’s summer offensive has led to significant territorial gains in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky has said the Russian leader’s continued attacks on civilians display a clear uninterest in pursuing peace.
Meanwhile, European countries are bracing themselves for the potential outbreak of World War III.
If challenged, NATO would easily outnumber the military forces of Russia, China, or North Korea individually – but as a collective alliance they represent a formidable foe to the West, as illustrated by the stark graphic below.
Going by the numbers, NATO’s collective military is by far the world’s most powerful fighting force.
The alliance’s 32 countries have over three million active personnel, around three million reserve personnel and 180 million men who are fit for service
Besides manpower, NATO countries also have over 14,000 tanks in their arsenals, over 3,000 fighter aircraft and nearly 1,500 attack helicopters.
Three nuclear-armed nations are also members: the U.S., the UK and France. This means the combined nuclear arsenal of NATO is more than 4,200 warheads.
But these impressive figures pale in comparison to the collective manpower of China, Russia and North Korea, which together pose an extreme threat to the West.
Compared to NATO’s three million military personnel, Xi, Kim and Putin boast nearly five million. The alliance has a million more soldiers in reserves than their Western counterparts, and almost 700 million men fit for service. They also have almost three thousand more tanks and significantly more fleet strength.
While NATO still comes out on top when it comes to submarines, aircraft carriers, fighter aircraft and attack helicopters, the combined nuclear capacity of North Korea, China and Russia poses the most significant threat.
Individually, China has 600 warheads, North Korea 50, and Russia 5,459. The combined arsenal of over 6,000 outnumbers NATO’s 4,200.
Latvia’s intelligence agency has previously sounded the alarm that Russian security services are developing their capabilities to ‘organise sabotage in Europe’ in preparation ‘for a possible military confrontation with NATO in the long term’.
And should a peace deal be reached that ‘freezes’ the conflict in Ukraine along existing battle lines, Moscow ‘would be able to increase its military presence next to NATO’s north-eastern flank, including the Baltics within the next five years’, the report claimed.
France’s ministry of health has told its health bodies to expect for a ‘major engagement’ by March 2026. The government anticipates ‘taking care of a potentially high influx of victims from abroad’, and is asking its hospitals to prepare for a potential flood of military patients seeking treatment.
Germany too is on high alert. The nation announced plans to buy more than €350billion (£304billion) worth of arms before the end of 2041, including €70.3billion for munitions, €52.5billion for combat vehicles and €36.6billion for naval vessels and equipment.
And as Russia prepares to conduct its military training in Belarus with the Zapad 2025 exercise, Germany’s Chief of Defence Carsten Breuer said the country was staying vigilant.
‘We will be on our guard, not just the German forces, but NATO,’ he said.
The general has warned that NATO should be equipped for a Russian attack in the next four years – a sentiment shared by Denmark, which predicted that the Russian leader may want to ‘test’ the bloc’s Article 5 commitment of mutual defence.
NATO chief Mark Rutte sounded the alarm in July about a major conflict that he anticipates would be started by simultaneous invasions from Xi and Putin.
He claimed that combined attacks from the Russian and Chinese leaders would trigger a World War nightmare and bring the planet to the brink of Armageddon.
According to the NATO chief, China would start by seeking to grab Taiwan – while ensuring the Kremlin dictator simultaneously attacks NATO territory, amid fears Putin is anyway eyeing the Baltic republics Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, formerly part of the USSR. Meanwhile, China boosted its defence spending by 7.2 per cent amid the tariff war with Trump earlier this year, after threatening America that it would be ready for ‘any war’. ‘China will fight to the end,’ the foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said.
Earlier this year, Russia was accused of increasing its use of prohibited chemical weapons as part of its onslaught on Ukraine – including the deployment of the WWI-era poison gas chloropicrin.
Russian soldiers use chloropicrin and riot control agent CS against sheltering Ukrainian soldiers, forcing them out into the open where they are more easily struck down, according to findings by the Netherlands’ military intelligence and security services.
In August, Putin dramatically pulled out of a Cold War-era treaty prohibiting short and medium-range nuclear missiles while warning the West to ‘expect further steps’ as tensions spiral.
The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, signed in 1987 by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, eliminated an entire class of ground-launched missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500km.
In 2019, America pulled out, accusing Russia of breaching its terms – an accusation Moscow furiously denied.
The collapse of the INF Treaty stoked fears of a repeat of a Cold War-era European missile crisis, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union both deployed intermediate-range missiles on the continent in the 1980s.
It comes as Russia’s missile forces chief declared that the new Oreshnik intermediate-range missile, which Russia first deployed against Ukraine in November, has a range to reach all of Europe.
According to Putin, the Oreshnik’s multiple warheads can plunge to a target at speeds up to Mach 10 and are immune to being intercepted. In fact, they are so powerful that the use of several of them in one conventional strike could be as catastrophic as a nuclear attack.
He has warned the West that Russia could deploy it against the NATO countries who allowed Ukraine to use their longer-range missiles to target Russia.
Lithuania has recently revealed plans to dig a 30-mile-wide ribbon of defences on its borders with Russia and Belarus that will include minefields and bridges set to blow up in case Moscow invades.
For the past year, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, alongside Poland have been fortifying their borders, adding obstacles and redoubts to existing fences amid Russia’s mounting aggression.
When complete, the Baltic defence line is estimated to be more than 940 miles long and will limit Russia’s ability to launch attacks from its own territory, Kaliningrad and Belarus.
Without help from the U.S., Europe would need to dramatically increase its nuclear weapons stockpile by about a thousand in the face of threats from Russia, experts have warned.
Maximilian Terhalle, a former Senior Adviser for strategic affairs to Britain’s Ministry of Defence and Visiting Professor at the Grand Strategy Programme of King’s College London, told The Telegraph in March: ‘We need to be on par with Russia’s 1,550 strategic warheads.
‘Otherwise we will not strategically influence what is going on in Putin’s mind, which is critical for deterrence.’
Russia has more than 5,000 nuclear warheads at its disposal, with 1,550 strategic warheads deployed in line with the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) – though Putin suspended Moscow’s participation in 2023.
By contrast, Britain and France – the only nuclear armed powers in Europe – have a shared total of just over 500 warheads.
North Korea has an arsenal of around 50 nuclear warheads, but this may rise to around 300 over the next decade with the assistance of Russia, according to Ankit Panda, an expert on North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
