Dr Marion Messmer

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100 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 10 Jul

Dr Marion Messmer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Independent Thinking · NATO in Ankara: Is Europe ready for a Russian attack? · 10 Jul 2026 podcast

And all of these things could intensify.

But at the same time it is also not inconceivable, especially if Russia thinks that Article five is not going to hold, that they could, for example, try to attack a Baltic state.

That's probably the most common conflict.

Well, right.

It would probably be a little nibble at first, you know, similar to what they did in Crimea where they try to go for part of a territory.

A really commonly assumed scenario is essentially the threat of the Zuwalki Gap, which is a stretch of land between Poland and Lithuania, which is essentially very difficult to defend because it's very narrow.

And so the idea is if Russia could rush into that and capture that territory.

Then it would be very difficult for NATO to win it back.

And so they wouldn't necessarily try a full frontal attack along all of the eastern flank or along all of NATO's border with Russia, but they would strategically choose

a location, Gotland and Sweden might be another such location, and then try to capture that to see how the alliance reacts, and that could pose quite a big challenge to NATO.

That's a good question.

I mean the Turkish Russian relationship is really interesting.

Gallip already hinted at some of the complexities there, and something that we haven't really discussed yet, but that was really on my mind, is that Turkey is one of the only NATO member states, if not the only NATO s member state that has previously responded very robustly, some might say rashly, to a Russian incursion of its airspace, in the sense that Turkey uh shot down a a Russian

jet.

And um arguably it could only do that because of its NATO membership, because it was able to hide behind Article V in a sense.

But it also did something that I'm sure many Polish officials, for example, have been quite envious of, as there have been drone incursions into Polish airspace.

I agree with Richard that especially because of its defence industry and because of its geography, it's an incredibly important NATO member.

And I don't think that the Turkish Russian relationship is such that it has to be a problem for NATO.

And I was really impressed with especially how the Turkish government handled the early years of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the Black Sea and in terms of not necessarily allowing ships passage so as not to make the problem worse in that regard.

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