NATO’s top military officer said Saturday the alliance is prepared for a possible Russian false-flag or staged attack on Europe’s eastern flank. Adm. Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, chair of the NATO Military Committee, told reporters during a regular meeting of the alliance’s 32 senior generals in Copenhagen that “the alliance is ready, the structure is ready, the soldiers … the weapons are ready,” and that those forces are still growing “in number … and also in sophistication.”

Four thousand pages, not a new war plan

Dragone said the generals did not put the latest political warnings on Saturday’s agenda. He argued they did not need to: NATO already holds “4,000 pages” of military plans for the eastern flank, starting with scenarios of a “minimal crisis or interference [on] our soil.” Allies agreed three regional defense plans in 2023 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “In case of an attack, we know how to do it,” he said. “Russia’s reckless behaviour over the last weeks and months … continues to test allied resolve” and “aims to undermine trust and weaken our unity.” Those attempts, he added, “are not dividing us. They are sharpening our tools.”

What European capitals said this week

The remarks followed a cluster of public warnings. On Thursday, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Moscow could send drones or missiles into a frontline NATO country in “the next few months” as a staged test of the alliance. France and the Netherlands echoed the risk. Europe has logged airspace violations and sabotage attempts in recent weeks. In August, U.S. intelligence reporting warned that Moscow was planning a limited assault on a NATO country in the coming years—a longer horizon than Tusk’s months, but the same geography.

What “ready” means for U.S. forces

U.S. European Command already rotates brigades, air-defense batteries, and maritime patrols through Poland, the Baltics, and the Black Sea approaches. A false-flag scenario is a political problem as much as a targeting problem: an incident that looks like a NATO casualty but is designed to split Article 5. Dragone’s answer was bureaucratic on purpose. He pointed to existing plans, not a new deployment announcement. For U.S. readers, that is the tell. There is no Saturday order moving another division. There is an Italian admiral telling 32 chiefs of defense that the paperwork and the units assigned to it are, in his phrase, ready.

The test still ahead

Allies can be “united and determined” in a press room and still argue about rules of engagement if a drone crosses a Polish or Estonian fence line. Tusk’s warning was about the next few months, not a theoretical decade. Dragone declined to say the committee had war-gamed that specific forecast on Saturday. He offered the 4,000-page stack instead. Whether that stack covers a one-drone provocation as cleanly as a brigade-sized raid is the question U.S. and European capitals will have to answer in real time, not in Copenhagen.