German Generals Warn Russia Could Attack NATO by 2029

The defining German story of the day was strategic. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung published interviews with four retired generals — Air Marshal Greg Bagwell (UK, RUSI), Lieutenant General Ben Hodges (US, former US Army Europe commander to 2017), Major General Mick Ryan (Australia, CSIS) and Lieutenant General Jürgen-Joachim von Sandrart (Germany) — who together argued that Russia could attack NATO within roughly five years, most likely a limited probe into the Baltics designed to test Article 5. Bagwell put the window at "perhaps five years"; von Sandrart said Russia, through its current force build-up, is "already today" capable of a regional conflict in parallel with Ukraine, and that the greatest danger therefore runs "until" 2029, not "from" 2029, as Berlin assumes. Hodges said Russia could "launch a limited attack against Latvia and then see what NATO does," and that under such an attack "Riga, Klaipeda, Gdansk and Bremerhaven could come under fire." Bagwell warned hits "in Poland or in Germany" would be likely.

The German exposure runs through Donald Trump's punitive moves against Berlin. Trump has signalled the withdrawal of at least 5,000 US troops and intends to shelve the Tomahawk missile battalion that Joe Biden had pledged for this year, designed to keep Russia's Iskanders in check; the German government no longer expects the battalion to arrive, in part because the United States is "firing everything its depots will give" in Iran. The Iskander-M, deployed in Kaliningrad, is estimated at roughly 500 km when fully loaded — enough to put Warsaw in acute danger and to threaten Berlin. Hodges called Ramstein "probably the most important American installation in Europe" — the centre of a complex housing the largest US military hospital outside the United States and NATO's Allied Air Command — and noted that, on a 2013 RAND Corporation calculation, the United States saves close to €1 billion a year by paying neither rent nor taxes for Ramstein and roughly 40 other major installations in Germany. The German response — modernising Taurus, pushing Taurus Neo, buying Tomahawks if Washington will not field them, and accelerating the European long-range programme ELSA — is judged "on a very, very good path" by the defence ministry but, the spokesman conceded, will "naturally take some time." The Information Warfare Initiative has proposed standing up four battalions and 1,200 missiles by spring 2027 through accelerated cooperation built on Taurus, with overall cost set at €15-19 billion by 2030 — a plan that would require the Bundestag to declare the Article 80a Grundgesetz "Spannungsfall," which needs a two-thirds majority not yet in sight.

A Bundeswehr voice ran in parallel. Major General Wolf-Jürgen Stahl, president of the Federal Academy for Security Policy (BAKS), told Ukrinform that the war in Ukraine has "fundamentally changed" Germany's strategic culture, citing Berlin's first-ever decision to supply weapons to an active conflict. In a separate interview, Stahl said Russia remains the greatest security threat to Europe and called for raising German resilience against hybrid attacks and strengthening defence capabilities.

The historical question travelled with the strategic one. Franziska Davies, a historian at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, argued that Germany's close business and political ties to Russia — Nord Stream 2 in particular — contributed to delays in delivering decisive Ukraine aid after the full-scale invasion, and she cited an unwillingness in parts of the political and economic establishment to break with Moscow as a structural drag on the response.

Domestically, Health Minister Nina Warken (CDU) said the statutory long-term care insurance system faces a financing gap of up to €22.5 billion by 2029, larger than previously expected. Warken attributed the shortfall to the rising number of people classified as needing care, including many children diagnosed with ADHD, and said reform of the system would be unavoidable. The figure landed in the same week that the strategic-defence debate was demanding more spending, not less, and threw the budget arithmetic on which both the Tomahawk substitute and the long-term care system depend back into the foreground.