Escalation watch

Slow-moving signals that would have to shift months or years before a NATO–Russia war, scored from open sources on both sides. A read-only snapshot, last updated 2026-09-24.

Where things stand

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Score over time

  • Overall
  • Europe/NATO
  • Russia

By category

How to read this

0 Dormant — no movement beyond pre-2022 norms. 1 Latent capacity — machinery being built, switch off: plans, studies, voluntary schemes. 2 Accelerating — capacity funded with dates, or active friction and loosened rules. 3 Activation — the switch on: compulsion, enforcement, deployments, direct clashes.

Each entry is dated to the event, not to the day it was researched, and marked as a baseline correction where an event predates the tracker. Scores can fall as well as rise: a score with no qualifying event for longer than its review period (1 month at score 3, 3 months at 2, 12 months at 1) is a candidate for lowering. Open-source and raw material — imagery, ship and flight tracking, legal texts, procurement records — is preferred over official statements, and sources from both sides are read for every indicator.