“Without political leadership and the willingness to make difficult decisions, NATO will crumble…There are no risk free operations in a war…And remember, the biggest cost and the greatest will be if Russia wins in Ukraine” ~ Jens Stoltenberg, On My Watch: Leading NATO in a Time of War
The Onset
February 24 marks the fourth anniversary of the Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, an event that has since assumed the character of a geopolitical caesura—one of those rare moments in international life where continuity gives way to rupture, and where the underlying assumptions of the international order are exposed, tested, and, in some respects, irrevocably altered. It was only days ago that I read On My Watch: Leading NATO in a Time of War (Gyldendal Norsk:2025) by Jens Stoltenberg – Former Secretary General of NATO – and found that the chapters dealing with Ukraine retain a particular gravity, not merely because of their immediacy, but because they offer a measured, almost juridical reflection on leadership exercised under the shadow of existential risk.
Stoltenberg recounts that he awoke to the sound of his telephone ringing at precisely 04:25 on Thursday, the twenty-fourth of February 2022. The voice on the line belonged to a NATO colleague, and the message was disarmingly simple: “It has started.” Within minutes, Stoltenberg was informed that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin wished to speak to him urgently. The choreography of crisis management had begun. Shortly thereafter, Stoltenberg turned on the television and watched an address by Vladimir Putin, whose tone was at once declaratory and menacing.
Putin announced that a “special military operation” was underway in Ukraine. The operation, he claimed, was necessary to protect the populations of Luhansk and Donetsk. Its purposes were articulated with ideological clarity: the “demilitarization” and “denazification” of Ukraine. Only precision weapons would be used; only military installations would be targeted; civilians, Putin assured, had nothing to fear. Ukrainian soldiers were urged to return home. The speech was designed to normalize aggression through euphemism, to clothe violence in the language of necessity, and to pre-empt moral outrage by invoking the familiar lexicon of humanitarian justification. History has since revealed the profound dissonance between those assurances and the reality that unfolded.
The Precursor
In reflecting upon Putin’s conduct, Stoltenberg looks back to a biography of the Russian leader published in 2000, which provides insight into the formative experiences that shaped both the man and the statesman. Central to this psychological portrait is the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when Putin was serving at the Soviet embassy in East Berlin. As crowds gathered and the authority of the old order dissolved, Putin and his colleagues felt exposed and threatened. Most tellingly, there was no communication from Moscow. The embassy was abandoned by the very center it existed to represent. For Putin, this absence of command, this paralysis of authority, came as a profound shock.
Stoltenberg is of the view that it is not unreasonable to view that moment as a precursor to Putin’s later conduct as the leader of Russia. From that experience appears to have emerged a singular resolve: never again would Russia be weak, humiliated, or incapable of defending what it perceived as its sphere of influence. Never again would it be paralyzed by indecision or abandoned by its own institutions. In Putin’s subsequent worldview, military power became not merely an instrument of policy but the ultimate guarantor of national dignity and geopolitical relevance. Strength was equated with coercive capacity; weakness with existential vulnerability.
Stoltenberg observes that Putin came to believe that NATO bore responsibility for the invasion of Ukraine, because NATO supported the democratically elected government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In Putin’s narrative, NATO was not a defensive alliance but an expansionist force, advancing inexorably toward Russia’s borders and eroding its strategic depth. This perception, whether sincerely held or strategically cultivated, provided the ideological scaffolding for aggression.
The Threat
Putin’s pre-invasion rhetoric was explicit in its warning. He declared that no matter who attempted to stand in Russia’s way, or create threats for its country and people, Russia would respond immediately, and the consequences would be such as had never been seen before. Stoltenberg remarks, with characteristic understatement, that it was difficult to interpret this statement as anything other than a veiled threat of nuclear escalation. The invocation of consequences beyond historical precedent placed the conflict in a category that transcended conventional warfare and entered the domain of existential deterrence, where miscalculation carries planetary risk.
Contrary to the expectations of many observers, including some within Western intelligence communities, Ukraine did not collapse. Kyiv did not fall within days. Zelensky did not flee. The Ukrainian armed forces, supported by an extraordinary mobilization of civil society, resisted with determination and adaptability. Four years later, the cost of that resistance is written in blood and ruin. More than 180,000 Russian soldiers are estimated to have perished, alongside tens of thousands of Ukrainian military personnel and civilians. Entire cities have been reduced to rubble; millions displaced; a generation marked by trauma. Yet Ukraine endured, and in doing so shattered the myth of Russian military inevitability.
Diplomatic Moves
Within days of the invasion, Zelensky contacted Stoltenberg with an urgent request. Russian aerial attacks were devastating Ukrainian cities, and Ukraine asked NATO to close its airspace by imposing a no-fly zone. Stoltenberg responded by praising the courage and competence of the Ukrainian armed forces and reaffirming NATO’s extensive support—political, financial, humanitarian, and military. But he also articulated a hard truth grounded in both law and prudence: NATO could not grant the request.
To enforce a no-fly zone would require NATO aircraft to engage Russian aircraft and strike Russian air defense systems. Such actions would render NATO a direct party to the conflict. The legal character of the war would change instantly, transforming it from a conflict between a state and a supported non-member into a war between Russia and the alliance itself. The likely consequence would be a large-scale war in Europe, with the ever-present risk of nuclear escalation. When Stoltenberg conveyed Zelensky’s request to NATO allies, the response was unanimous. The alliance would support Ukraine, but it would not cross the threshold into direct belligerency.
This decision, often misunderstood by critics as timidity or moral failure, merits closer examination through the lens of international law. Under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, Ukraine possessed an inherent right of individual and collective self-defense. NATO states could, and did, assist Ukraine through arms supplies, intelligence sharing, training, and financial aid. What they could not do—without fundamentally altering the nature of the conflict—was engage directly in hostilities. Neutrality, in modern international law, is not a binary condition but a spectrum of permissible conduct. NATO’s approach reflected a calibrated understanding of that spectrum, designed to uphold Ukraine’s right to self-defense while preventing a broader conflagration.
In the words of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the invasion marked a Zeitenwende, a turning point. The post-Cold War assumption that economic interdependence and institutional integration would render large-scale war in Europe unthinkable was decisively shattered. The invasion forced European states to confront uncomfortable truths about deterrence, defense spending, and strategic autonomy.
At subsequent meetings of NATO allies, including one held in Oslo, a consensus emerged that Russia’s war of aggression was not fundamentally about the Donbas, nor even about Crimea. Those territories, while symbolically and strategically significant, were not the true object of the conflict. The war was about Ukraine’s position in Europe—about whether a sovereign state could choose its own political, economic, and security orientation without being subjected to coercive reversal by a more powerful neighbor.
A Perceived Compromise
From this understanding flowed a reconfiguration of NATO’s approach to Ukraine. Allies agreed on a framework that rested on three interrelated pillars. First, comprehensive practical and financial support would be provided to ensure Ukraine’s capacity to defend itself and maintain the functioning of its institutions. Second, a NATO-Ukraine Council would be established to deepen coordination and elevate Ukraine’s voice within the alliance’s consultative structures. Third, the requirement for a Membership Action Plan—a procedural prerequisite that had long served as a gatekeeping mechanism—would be removed, recognizing that Ukraine’s path toward NATO membership could not be subjected to peacetime formalism in the face of existential threat.
These decisions reflected an evolution in NATO’s self-conception. The alliance was no longer merely a passive guarantor of a static security order but an adaptive institution responding to dynamic threats. At the same time, it remained acutely aware of the limits of its mandate and the catastrophic risks of escalation.
The Munich Security Conference
The Report of the Munich Security Conference (MSC2026) – held between 13 and 15 February 2026 – which was on the theme “Under Destruction”, states that Europe today stands at a sobering historical threshold, one that marks the end of complacent assumptions and the return of strategic gravity to the continent. The era in which Europe could luxuriate in the belief that peace was permanent, that war had been relegated to the margins of history, has been unceremoniously dismantled. Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, accompanied by a widening spectrum of hybrid operations, has not merely disrupted Europe’s security environment; it has dismantled the very architecture of cooperative security painstakingly assembled after the Cold War. What confronts Europe now is not a passing crisis but a prolonged condition of confrontation, in which ambiguity, coercion, and brute force coexist in a grim continuum of “war and unpeace.”
Compounding this unsettling reality is the unmistakable recalibration of the United States’ role in European security. For decades, Europe flourished beneath an American security umbrella that allowed it to channel its energies toward economic integration, social welfare, and normative power rather than military might. That strategic indulgence has now reached its limit. Washington’s gradual retreat from its traditional posture as Europe’s principal security guarantor—manifest in hesitant support for Ukraine and unsettling rhetoric even touching on territories such as Greenland—has sharpened Europe’s sense of exposure. The transition from security consumer to security provider, long discussed and endlessly deferred, is no longer theoretical; it is an urgent, unfinished task.
European responses to these shifting transatlantic signals reveal a continent caught in a psychological interregnum. There is, on the one hand, denial: a persistent hope that the United States can be persuaded to remain deeply and indefinitely engaged, that familiar certainties can be restored through reassurance and diplomacy. On the other hand, there is reluctant acceptance: a growing recognition that Europe must assume a far greater share of responsibility for its own defence, even if it lacks the habits, structures, and political consensus to do so swiftly. This tension has produced a cautious, sometimes contradictory approach—efforts to anchor the United States within Europe’s security framework while only incrementally advancing toward genuine strategic autonomy.
In practical terms, Europe has not been idle. Faced with existential stakes, European states have begun to assemble flexible coalitions of leadership, increase defence expenditures, and provide Ukraine with substantial military, financial, and humanitarian assistance. These measures signal a belated awakening to hard power realities. Yet they are accompanied by an unease that is difficult to dispel: the suspicion that these efforts, while significant, may still be insufficient to compensate for the erosion of what was once known as Pax Americana. The question haunting European capitals is whether incremental adaptation can truly substitute for the loss of a hegemonic guarantor.
Russia’s conduct leaves little room for illusion. Moscow represents the most direct and consequential threat to European security in generations. Under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine constituted a frontal assault on the norm of territorial integrity, violating it with a brazenness unseen since the Second World War. Now deep into its fifth year, the conflict has reached new levels of brutality, with Russia regaining tactical momentum in certain theaters despite catastrophic losses. Sanctions, international isolation, and Ukrainian strikes deep into Russian territory have not moderated the Kremlin’s objectives. On the contrary, Russia has entrenched itself in a war economy, devoting a staggering proportion of state resources to defence and security, while expanding its industrial capacity to sustain prolonged conflict.
Equally troubling is the ideological framing of this war. Russian propaganda persistently casts the struggle as a civilizational confrontation between Russia and the West, a narrative designed to mobilize domestic support and to resonate with sympathetic audiences abroad. Nuclear threats, casually invoked, serve as a constant reminder that escalation remains an ever-present risk. Intelligence assessments suggesting that Russia could regenerate sufficient forces for a regional conflict in the Baltic within a short span after a ceasefire only deepen Europe’s anxiety. The threat, plainly, does not end at Ukraine’s borders.
Beyond conventional warfare, Russia has methodically expanded its hybrid campaign across Europe. Acts of sabotage, cyberattacks, disinformation, airspace violations, and covert surveillance have become disturbingly frequent. These actions are calibrated to remain just below the threshold of open conflict—deniable enough to evade clear attribution, yet potent enough to sow fear, division, and political paralysis. By blurring the line between war and peace, Moscow tests Europe’s resilience and probes its defences, seeking to weaken public support for Ukraine while forcing governments to divert attention inward. Europe now faces the delicate task of deterring such provocations without triggering unintended escalation.
At this moment of profound uncertainty, Washington’s posture has become a decisive variable. The administration of Donald Trump has been explicit in its expectation that Europe must assume primary responsibility for its own defence. Calls for dramatically increased defence spending and a rebalancing of burdens within NATO have underscored this shift. While some reassurance remains—troop withdrawals have been limited and alliance structures intact—the ambiguity surrounding America’s long-term intentions has unsettled European allies.
The Report goes on to say that nowhere is this ambiguity more evident than in Washington’s approach to Ukraine. Attempts to broker a settlement, including leaked peace proposals that appeared to privilege Russian demands while constraining Ukraine’s sovereignty, have alarmed European capitals. Such initiatives suggest a United States increasingly willing to act as an arbiter rather than an ally, prioritizing expedient conflict management over principled outcomes. Although subsequent revisions softened the most contentious elements, the episode exposed a growing divergence between American and European strategic preferences.
Statements from senior US officials, including Pete Hegseth, have reinforced the message that safeguarding Europe—and sustaining Ukraine—must primarily be a European endeavour. Simultaneously, voices within the Alliance, such as Mark Rutte, have warned that Europe must prepare for a scale of war reminiscent of darker chapters in its past. Together, these signals crystallize a stark truth: Europe can no longer outsource its security.
What emerges, then, is a continent in transition—uneasy, exposed, yet slowly awakening. The old certainties have dissolved, replaced by a harsher strategic landscape in which power, resolve, and preparedness once again matter. Europe’s challenge is not merely material but conceptual: to abandon denial, to confront the permanence of confrontation, and to complete its long-delayed transformation into a credible security provider. Whether it can do so in time, and with sufficient unity, remains the defining question of its future.
My Take
Four years on, Stoltenberg’s warning resonates with undiminished force: the greatest cost will be if Russia wins in Ukraine. Such an outcome would extend far beyond the redrawing of borders. It would undermine the foundational principle that wars of conquest are illegitimate. It would embolden authoritarian regimes and weaken the already fragile authority of international law. It would signal that nuclear-armed states may act with impunity, shielded by the threat of escalation.
Conversely, Ukraine’s survival represents more than national resilience. It constitutes a test of whether collective security, institutional restraint, and principled leadership still have meaning in an international system increasingly characterized by power politics. NATO’s conduct throughout this period illustrates a paradox that lies at the heart of modern statecraft: restraint, often mistaken for weakness, can in fact be the highest expression of strength. The refusal to cross certain thresholds was not an abdication of responsibility, but an exercise in moral and strategic judgment.
On My Watch is therefore more than a memoir. It is a meditation on leadership under conditions of radical uncertainty. Stoltenberg’s stewardship of NATO during this period underscores the importance of political leadership willing to make difficult decisions, to resist both panic and hubris, and to navigate between solidarity and escalation. Four years after the invasion, Ukraine remains battered but unbroken. NATO remains tested but intact. The war continues, but so too does the effort to prevent its expansion into a wider catastrophe.
History will ultimately judge this period not only by outcomes, but by choices made under pressure—choices that balanced law and power, courage and caution, moral clarity and strategic restraint. The watch, as Stoltenberg reminds us, has not yet ended.
