‘Ready to fight tonight’: NATO’s top general says the alliance would win a war with Russia
by Jacob Wirtschafter · The Washington TimesWARSAW — NATO’s top commander, U.S. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, said Monday that the alliance is “ready to fight tonight” if Russia attacks, and for the first time publicly laid out how the alliance would win.
“If someone is foolish enough to attack us, we will fight. We will stop the attack,” the U.S. Air Force general told an audience at the Warsaw Security Forum, just hours after the Kremlin rejected a Ukrainian truce offer. Poland, which borders Ukraine, Belarus and Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave, hosts about 10,000 American troops.
The general, who took over the NATO command in July 2025, urged the European leaders in attendance at the annual defense conference to step up support for Ukraine in response to Russia’s increasingly aggressive actions against NATO members, including airspace violations, arson attacks, sabotage and cyberattacks.
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“I do not assess that conflict is imminent or inevitable,” Gen. Grynkewich said. “I want to assure the 1 billion citizens of our alliance that we’ve got this.” Paraphrasing George Washington, he added, “The most effective way to preserve peace is to prepare for war.”
Yet some European defense analysts listening to the general found little reassurance in his remarks.
Jacek Bartosiak, founder of Strategy & Future, a Warsaw geopolitical think tank, said American primacy “is gone, not to return.”
“The U.S. is moving toward predatory hegemony, especially against allies that are dependent in security and in the financial world,” Mr. Bartosiak told The Washington Times.
He said Poland has spent years “preparing for a role of auxiliaries for the U.S. military.”
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Americans have an interest in proving “that the Europeans can’t stand alone,” he said, “and that creates conditions for war. Low-scale, low-key war, but still war against NATO allies in the East.”
Gen. Grynkewich rejected that view.
“No one should question the commitment of the United States to this alliance,” he said. “I’m right here. I’m an American officer that was sent here by President Trump.”
Matthew Whitaker, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, said Washington is not leaving. “We still love you,” he said, but he listed Europe fourth among American priorities, after the homeland, the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific.
Gen. Grynkewich shared insights into what he called NATO’s “theory of victory” — the strategy designed to deter and defeat a Russian attack.
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He said the alliance would “block” an initial attack, “blunt” any advance and, if the fighting went on, “break” the enemy forces and “anything and everything that supports, sustains or controls” them.
The war plan draws on lessons from Ukraine, where cheap drones have changed the battlefield. NATO will mix “high-end and highly effective precision munitions with an overpowering mass of affordable and scalable systems,” he said.
Iran began shipping Shahed attack drones to Russia in 2022 and helped it build a factory in Tatarstan that now turns them out by the thousands as the renamed Geran.
Retired Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, a former CIA director, said no ally has caught up.
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“I do not believe that any country in the alliance, or even in the Western world, has yet identified the entire new concept of war to drive institutional change,” he said.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called for more pressure on Moscow. “Russia is certainly not interested in a ceasefire, de-escalation or peace. It is interested only in domination,” he said.
“For the U.S. and the Western Europeans, they always need Russia for something,” Mr. Bartosiak said. Poland and its neighbors “don’t need Russia. They need Russia to be weak.”
He said Poland also needs “deterrence by punishment,” the ability to “strike deep, kill and destroy so that they think twice.” He wants Poland to build its own long-range strike weapons, “cheap and in mass,” without depending on Washington.
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Mr. Bartosiak said growing skepticism about American guarantees may push allies toward nuclear weapons, and that Washington itself may drop 80 years of nonproliferation policy, naming “the Saudis, the Poles, the Japanese” as possible candidates to go nuclear.
European governments blame Russia for a wave of arson, sabotage and drone incursions. In September 2025, Polish and allied jets shot down Russian drones over Poland, a first for the alliance.
Gen. Grynkewich said the best answer is to name Moscow publicly and send Ukraine more interceptors, including through NATO’s Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List, or PURL, under which European allies buy American weapons for Kyiv. That would show Russia it is “only strengthening” allied resolve, he said. Much of that aid crosses into Ukraine through a hub at Rzeszow, in southeastern Poland.
European officials told the Financial Times that Washington has threatened to halt that program and to cut intelligence sharing with Kyiv, to press Ukraine to stop striking Russian energy sites.
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European officials say Russia has also gone after the power links, gas pipelines and data cables under the Baltic and North seas. On Christmas Day 2024, the tanker Eagle S, which European officials tied to Russia’s “shadow fleet” of ships evading sanctions, dragged its anchor across a power link between Finland and Estonia and four data cables.
“I think that it [was] deliberately dropped,” Asta Sihvonen-Punkka, president and chief executive officer of Fingrid, Finland’s grid operator, said of the anchor. Norway, Europe’s biggest gas supplier, sent warships to guard its North Sea fields and pipelines after the 2022 Nord Stream blasts. Orlen, Poland’s state-controlled oil company, fends off more than 2,000 cyberattacks a month, mostly from Russia, said Pawel Wojtunik, its vice president for security and risk.
Vice Adm. Krzysztof Jaworski, deputy commander general of Poland’s armed forces, said no military can guard every cable. “If we cannot see something, we cannot react,” he said.
Gen. Grynkewich said watching wars in the Middle East and Ukraine at the same time gave NATO “real insight on what the stresses on our warfighting system would be and how we needed to adapt.”