“Russia Won’t Stop at Ukraine” And the Politics of Exaggeration

by Cesar Jaramillo | October 14, 2025

The notion that Russia “will not stop at Ukraine” has become a convenient political narrative that portrays Moscow as poised to overrun Europe – rallying publics, justifying continued arms deliveries to Ukraine, and expanding military budgets across the West. Yet it is detached from military reality and strategically counterproductive. Fear and exaggeration may sell urgency, but they undermine the sober judgment required for sound policy prescriptions to find a resolution to the war in Ukraine.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself has repeatedly asserted that Russia intends to move beyond Ukraine, invoking this threat to sustain Western engagement and military aid. “Ukraine is only first,” he declared last month at the UN General Assembly, urging Western leaders to treat the conflict as the front line of a broader war against them.

This view was echoed by Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski in London earlier this week, when he warned European nations that Russia could strike “deep into Europe.” Similar arguments have appeared in major Western outlets, often reported as fact rather than as political interpretation.

Circumstances may change, but to suggest at this point that Russia is in any position to replicate in NATO countries what it has done in Ukraine amounts to either a flawed analysis or irresponsible fearmongering. Such rhetoric stokes public anxiety, fuels defence budgets, and makes perpetual militarization and ever-increasing military expenditures sound like common sense when they are anything but.

This is not to excuse or diminish Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Moscow bears responsibility for launching a war in clear violation of international law, one that has brought immense suffering and instability and is in dire need of resolution. But solidarity with Ukraine does not require accepting fear-based narratives that misrepresent the nature of the threat and distort the policy response.

Russia continues to pose a real and serious danger to Ukraine, one that has profoundly destabilized the European security order. Yet extrapolating that danger into the specter of a Russian march across NATO borders lacks evidence, misreads intent, and risks leading Europe into policies that weaken rather than strengthen its own security.

Still, this framing persists as it serves clear purposes for different actors. For Ukraine, it keeps Western publics engaged and sustains the flow of military aid by transforming its struggle into Europe’s own, a preemptive war for the continent’s survival. For Western governments, it provides a simple, emotionally resonant narrative to justify unprecedented military expenditures. And for the behemoth that has become the global arms industry, it ensures demand without end.

The NATO–Russia Balance of Power

The military balance tells a different story. NATO and its partners collectively spend more than 1.3 trillion U.S. dollars per year on defence, outspending Russia by a margin of approximately ten to one. More than twenty NATO members now meet or exceed the long-standing goal of spending at least 2% of GDP on defence and, at the 2025 Hague summit, alliance leaders endorsed a proposed new target of 5% of GDP by 2035.

Moreover, NATO benefits from dominant advantages in air and naval strength, global logistics and sustainment, intelligence and surveillance networks, technological and industrial capacity, and command & control. These structural advantages give the alliance a considerably stronger baseline position compared to Russia, especially in conventional power projection.

By contrast, Russia’s conventional forces have been significantly strained in Ukraine. Independent estimates cite hundreds of thousands of casualties, thousands of destroyed armored vehicles, and a defence industry that struggles to replace even basic components because of sanctions. Attrition on this scale has revealed the limits of Russian power, not its reach.

Even before the war, Moscow’s capacity to project sustained force far beyond its borders was modest. Today, after more than two years of high-intensity warfare, posing a credible military challenge to NATO is even less plausible.

Any full-scale attack on NATO territory would trigger an immediate collective response under Article 5, confronting Russia with the combined industrial, technological, and logistical strength of an alliance representing most of the world’s military spending. Such an act would not expand Russia’s empire, it would likely end it.

In short, the data reinforces what common sense already suggests: Russia’s war machine is dangerous, but it is not inexhaustible. What Russia can and does do is probe, pressure, and provoke. Drone incursions, cyberattacks, and disinformation campaigns serve as instruments of disruption, not domination. They aim to create anxiety, divide societies, and test political resolve. But there is a vast difference between sowing chaos and launching an invasion. The Kremlin has publicly dismissed claims that it plans to attack NATO states as “nonsense.”

None of this is to suggest that Russia could not inflict catastrophic nuclear damage on Europe if it chose to. But the assumption is that Moscow, like Washington and other nuclear capitals, will seek to avoid a suicidal nuclear escalation – even if the shadow, and risk, of nuclear weapons are ever present. For all its persistence in Ukraine, the Kremlin understands the difference between a war of aggression and a war of annihilation. And for all its rhetoric of unconditional support for Ukraine, NATO understands that an attack on Kyiv, however consequential, is not the same as an attack on London, Brussels, or New York.

The Politics of Fear

The “Russia-won’t-stop-at-Ukraine” rhetoric is not just problematic because it is false; it is that it distorts policy decisions. By inflating the threat, policymakers and the public are left operating in a permanent state of emergency, where any level of militarization appears reasonable, any erosion of civil oversight acceptable, and any suspension of diplomatic restraint easily justified.

Across Europe, defence spending is soaring to levels unseen since the Cold War. Under the banner of deterrence, vast sums are being poured into procurement programs that often serve political or commercial industrial interests more than strategic necessity.

Each new weapons order is presented as a bulwark against an imagined Russian blitz, even as these resources are diverted from the very foundations of genuine security. What is needed is not ever-larger arsenals, already vast and unmatched, that add little to an already overwhelming military balance, but the diplomatic determination and political courage to end this war and to confront the other urgent crises of the time – not least the climate emergency, the displacement of millions, and the unmet social needs within societies worldwide.

When public discourse treats war as inevitable, leaders risk institutionalizing a permanent war economy. What begins as a short-term surge in spending risks hardening into a self-perpetuating security-industrial complex that demands continuous threat inflation to justify itself. If one insists that Russia will inevitably attack, then negotiation seems naïve, arms control irrelevant, and even basic risk-reduction measures appear suspect.

The consequences are predictable: threat inflation feeds on itself, and Russia seizes on NATO rearmament to justify its own adversarial posture. NATO will, in turn, find in that posture fresh justification for further buildup – a pernicious spiral of arms racing, heightened tensions and nuclear risk that will sooner or later prove untenable.

Cesar Jaramillo is Executive Director at SANE Policy Institute.