Rarely does a piece of television docu-drama land in the middle of an unfolding real-world crisis as squarely as Sky’s The Wargame. Even as the first episode opened with an all-star cast of former British ministers, generals and MI6 officers contemplating their response to a fictional Kremlin grey-zone attack on the UK, French President Emmanuel Macron summoned party leaders to an emergency meeting to discuss urgent intelligence warnings of possible Russian aggression.
Just days before, Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk warned his parliament that intelligence assessments suggested Russia might launch an attack with drones or missiles on Nato territory “in the coming months.” Poland’s veteran Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski doubled down, warning Russia that Nato’s air superiority could destroy Russia’s oil refining capacity within days in the event of any attempted invasion of the Baltics. Nato’s response would “not just be defensive,” warned Sikorski. “It would be offensive.”
The day after Denmark’s intelligence service warned of a “low but growing risk” that Russia could launch a limited military attack against one or more Nato countries bordering Russia, Sweden and Finland scrambled fighter jets to intercept and identify Russian military aircraft over the Gulf of Finland, in their first such joint operation.
Sky’s The Wargame is a drama – but one based on years of research by the showrunner, Sky News' Security and Defence Editor Deborah Haynes. The cast is also made up of ministers, generals and MI6 officers with real, recent experience at the highest levels of the British and US states. Among them were General Sir Richard Barrons, Chief of Defence Staff, Kim Darroch, National Security Adviser, and Christopher Steele, Intelligence Chief. Former Nato Secretary General George Robertson plays himself, while former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci takes the role of US Secretary of State.
Many elements of the drama ring very true. Most important is the fact that the Russian attack comes as an escalating series of hybrid operations – sabotage and assassination attacks that fall below an identifiable threshold for triggering Nato’s Article 5 collective security clause. Britain’s inability to deter a Russian attack, to defend itself when it comes, or to properly respond also tracks with reported reality.
Military chiefs tell the political leaders there is "bugger all" military capacity available because so many aircraft, destroyers and submarines are out of action or in maintenance. Another telling moment came as viewers watch the politicians gathered in the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms – more dramatically known as COBR – backtrack on years of belligerent anti-Russian rhetoric the moment that words turn into sticks and stones; ‘Deputy PM’ played by Nicola Sturgeon instead blames ‘Foreign Secretary’ Jim Murphy's diplomacy for taking Britain to the verge of annihilation.
The entire show is based on a real-life April 2024 Sky News report by Haynes on the alarming fact that Whitehall officials were combing through the Cabinet Office’s Government War Book – Cold War-era records of Nato's biannual Winter Exercises and Civil-Military Exercise, discontinued in 1990 – for clues on how to transition Britain to war readiness.
Out in the real world, war-games, whether played out around a conference table or on the ground as military exercises, happen all the time. In the two most recent boots-on-the-ground war-games Nato forces were seriously put to the test by Ukrainian veteran drone operators playing the ‘Red’ – read Russian – team. In both the Hedgehog exercise played out in Estonia in May 2025 and Aurora 26, involving 18,000 Nato troops in Sweden this April–May, a handful of experienced drone pilots inflicted devastating damage. In this instance, Anatoliy Merkotun, commander of the Ukrainian Nemesis unit in Aurora 26, said Nato's habit of keeping vehicles and troops in compact groups looked “nearly suicidal”, a way of fighting both Russia and Ukraine had “abandoned years ago.”
Meanwhile a host of Western armies and military think tanks – notably the US Naval War College, the Pentagon's Joint Staff, and US European Command and Strategic Commands, plus the UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and the Defence Academy – constantly play out war-game scenarios to test readiness. A war-game exercise organised by the German newspaper Die Welt and the Helmut Schmidt University of the German Armed Forces last December envisaged a scenario where the Kremlin used bogus claims of a “humanitarian crisis” in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad to seize the Lithuanian city of Marijampole. Within days, in that war-game, an absence of US leadership and hesitancy from Nato countries allowed Moscow to gain total control over the Baltic within days, using an initial force of only 15,000 troops.
“The Russians achieved most of their goals without moving many of their own units,” Bartłomiej Kot, a Polish security analyst who acted as the Polish prime minister, told The Wall Street Journal. “What this showed to me is that once we are confronted by the escalatory narrative from the Russian side, we have it embedded in our thinking that we are the ones who should be de-escalating.”
The results of official military war-games are rarely made public. But, says a senior European diplomat who still acts as a national security adviser to a major Nato country, “these games are nothing like the real world and actually not designed to be so.” Rather, the idea of official war-games is to stress-test specific national systems, military or political – and therefore exclude outside variables that in real life would be crucial.
“What will be the effect of your diplomacy or your military actions on your adversary – this is outside the scope of the game,” says the diplomat. “Ultimately you can only test yourself.” An upcoming example of such a practical preparedness test is Britain’s Exercise Albiston Shadow in 2027, billed as the largest UK home defence exercise in several decades, with ministers and hundreds of officials testing emergency responses to hybrid attacks.
But what Sky’s The Wargame does not address is the most important question of all – how to cut through the fog of misunderstanding, rhetoric and paranoia which is the seed-bed of a brewing showdown with Russia. On the one hand, it is provably true that Russia’s security agencies have been stepping up arson and sabotage attacks on European and British soil – including the most alarming yet, a failed explosive drone attack earlier this summer on Ukrainian planes in Germany’s Leipzig airport.
On the other, intelligence chiefs in the Baltic states say that, in reality, they have no reason to believe that Russia is actually planning an armed incursion against Nato. “We don’t see indications of an imminent attack,” Normunds Mežviets, director of the VDD, Latvia’s state security service, told The Guardian last week. And Jonatan Vseviov, secretary-general of Estonia’s foreign ministry, decried “panic on social media” in recent days about a possible attack, noting that “if there is reason to fear an attack, rest assured: we will make that clear. Until then, keep calm, carry on and support Ukraine.”
One major problem is that shows like The Wargame, as well as the recent vague warnings from European leaders about rising security threats from Russia, actually serve the Kremlin’s purposes. “Scaremongering is a Kremlin psy-op,” argues Ed Lucas, founder and director of the Baltic International Security Centre. “The real attack is not on infrastructure, industry, individuals or any other physical target. It's on our decision-making.”
The Kremlin is “trying to spread FUD – Fear Uncertainty Doubt – and far too many supposedly expert voices are amplifying this,” Lucas warned on Twitter. Objectively, the Russian army has suffered catastrophic losses of up to half a million killed over the last four years and has so far failed to even take all of Donbas or more than 23% of Ukraine. Russia’s economy is twenty-five times smaller than Nato’s, and its defence spending eight times less. A war-game that pits the Kremlin’s entire strength against the comparatively tiny Baltic nations – or for that matter against Britain’s hollowed-out army and navy and dysfunctional government bureaucracy – might see a hypothetical win for Moscow within those artificial parameters. But on the bigger picture, Sikorski is right – Nato, for all its shortcomings, still remains unreservedly by far the most powerful military alliance in the world.
And while Donald Trump has insisted that Europe should pay for its own defence, the US remains, at base, strategically committed to Nato and its defensive principles. There may be a handful of old KGB men at the top of the Kremlin who are clearly badly informed and paranoid – the proximate causes of Putin’s foolish gamble on his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – but it is unlikely that they are actually suicidal enough to imagine that attacking Nato would end in anything other than national annihilation.
Rather, what the Kremlin’s escalating hybrid war appears to be aimed at is eroding Europe’s resolve to continue to back Ukraine. This is why it is striking what it considers to be Ukrainian military-related targets inside Europe. The danger here is mutual misunderstanding. Most of the latest Russian attacks – including several bumbling plots in the UK – have been carried out by petty criminals and thugs working for hire. And these blunt instruments can and do screw up, with potentially world-changing effects.
Imagine, for instance, if the Leipzig bombers had succeeded in bringing down a cargo plane in flight over Germany, with mass civilian casualties? Or if the plot to bomb a DHL hub in Birmingham in 2024 had done the same? Ken McCallum, head of MI5, warned last October that British security services and police have disrupted "a steady stream of … plots with hostile intent" by Russian agents against their enemies on UK soil. But these are acts of thuggery and murder, not war against the UK.
Alarmist TV shows, along with equally alarmist but non-specific statements by politicians, perform one useful function in warning just how unfit for purpose Europe’s military preparedness is. But in another sense, they’re profoundly dangerous. Fear is Russia’s most effective weapon, and the Kremlin is keen to project power that it does not, in reality, possess.
Volodymyr Zelensky’s regular message that the Russian enemy is at the gates of Europe is useful for focusing governments on the need to come up with money and weapons for Ukraine. But this strategy also spurs real military preparations which Russia is taking seriously as messages of European hostility. And with neither side ready to back down or take a more realistic view of the other’s intentions, such escalation could spiral out of control.
