Is NATO Ready to Defend the Baltic States If Moscow Crosses the Border? — Interview with Glen Grant

03.09.2026, 02:11 uatv.ua

The secret visit of CIA Director John Ratcliffe to Moscow has raised more questions than answers. Military expert and former British Army officer Glen Grant analyzes the potential reasons behind the talks with the FSB and explains how real the threat of a direct confrontation between Russia and NATO truly is. Is the Alliance ready to defend the Baltic states if Moscow crosses the border? We also discuss a potential new mobilization of 600,000 Russians, its blow to the Russian economy, the Kremlin’s manpower struggles, and the risk of a renewed offensive on Kyiv from the north.

— My guest today is Colonel Glen Grant, retired — 37 years in the British Army. Wow. Defence attaché in Estonia and Latvia, and adviser to Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence, back in 2014. Mr. Grant, welcome, sincerely, back to UATV. Is it my fault you’ve been missing? Right — are you in Riga now?

— Yes, I am, at the moment.

— So how are we doing — being born and raised in Latvia myself — how are things in Riga? Do people feel like something is looming on the horizon?

— It’s a good question, but there’s a lot of unease at the moment. It hasn’t turned into anything desperate, because the politicians are still saying there’s no problem, and that’s probably right, at the moment. But that doesn’t mean to say there won’t be a problem. At the moment, as long as people like the president of Finland say everything’s okay, then people will stay calm.

— Well, okay — this is the reason we’ll give you exactly that experience. You have the experience to break things down. What happened this past week? Let’s put it into blocks. The core question in block one: on 25th August, the director of the CIA flew directly to Moscow, Mr. Grant, with no announcement beforehand — nothing like that. CBS News reported he was there, supposedly, to warn Russia against attacking NATO members — media in all three Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, was closely following this.

Two days later, the president of the United States, in the Oval Office, said — I quote — “He’s not going to attack a NATO country, Putin,” and called that same trip routine: there was no message, nothing unusual. Ratcliffe himself has said nothing.

You live in the Latvian capital, Riga. As a military man, as a military person — what do you do with a situation where the warning about your own country exists only as a leak, and the only statement on the record says there’s nothing to fear?

— Well, first of all, it’s a statement from Trump, so you ignore it, because it’s worth nothing. I think the second thing people need to understand is that Ratcliffe is not a spy chief — he’s just another crony of Trump’s who’s got a job. He’s got no experience, nothing to back him up when he goes to Russia. And I’m pretty sure one of the reasons Putin didn’t want to see him is because he just thinks he’s a charlatan, a cheap impostor, who’s got a job but has no understanding or knowledge of how to do it. So you’ve got to keep that in the background all the time.

And let’s be blunt — we don’t know at all what he went there for. It could have been personal reasons, trying to get his own position alongside Trump into a better place. He says, “Look, I’ll go, because the others have all failed.” That’s entirely possible.

But then you’ve got to look at the others, and I’ll list them quickly. First, the NATO thing — could be NATO, could be the Baltics, we don’t know. But we know there’s nothing happening on the other side, in terms of strength. Building barracks alongside Finland is not lining up for an attack — it’s just putting up barracks alongside Finland, and there’s nobody in them anyway. So that’s one thing.

Nuclear — was he going there because Putin was threatening to go nuclear? We don’t know. He’s reached the stage of silliness and stupidity where he may actually think about doing that. But remember, all his team’s families are in the West — Lavrov included, with his family in the West — so they’re not going to want to start something. That’s another thing.

The meeting idea that was mentioned — going there and suggesting a meeting — well, that’s a nothing-burger, because there’s absolutely no way Putin is going to have a meeting until he believes Ukraine has given up, so that he can be triumphant, ride in on a white horse, and say, “Look, I’ve beaten them.” So you can count that one out.

Iran — that’s a possibility, that they went there begging Putin to stop supplying Iran, especially through the Caspian Sea. That’s a real possibility, because Trump needs a win, and he hasn’t got much going for him before the midterms. If he could get Putin to say, “Yes, I’ll slow it down” — but Putin’s not going to, because he knows Trump is on his back foot, has got nothing to offer at the moment, and is weak, especially weak militarily. So you can count that one out too.

That leaves you with Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova. Would Trump do anything to help any of those? No. But would he go there and say, “I’m not going to do anything if you do something”? Yes, he would — because he favors Putin more than he favors everybody else. So there’s a whole list of things. Don’t ask me which one it is — I have no idea. We’ll find out.

— Yes, we will find out in due course. And then we’ll have another meeting. But you used that term — “to beg” Russia to do something about Iran, to stop supplying Iran. Begging — America is begging Russia, right?

— Yes, of course it is. Because they’ve got nothing — they’re losing, they’re losing badly. They’re losing face in the world, day by day. They’ve lost huge face in the Middle East, and it’s going to take a long time before they manage to get bases back there. I think it’s twelve of their bases that have been trashed — maybe more, maybe less, but it’s a lot — with trillions of dollars’ worth of damage and deaths in the Middle East. And those countries are now assessing whether there’s still value in having America in their country, if they’re going to get attacked because of it.

So I quite understand that America doesn’t bring anything to the party at the moment. In fact, all it does is act like that drunken person you don’t want coming to the party, smashing and falling over the tables and chairs. That is the USA that we have today, sadly. And while Trump is in charge, it’s not going to get any better.

— Do you think he’ll still be in charge come the midterms, with everything looming on the horizon?

— Well, his constituents are still there. America — they’ve never been great. It just shows the complete disaster of the American education system — that critical thinking has been weeded out somewhere in the last 20, 30 years. You can see that from all these interviews people are doing in America — the complete nonsense that comes back from people about how wonderful Trump is, what a great job he’s doing, and so forth.

— Okay, Mr. Grant — it’s an endless topic for conversation. But let’s get back to things on the ground here in Ukraine. Ukraine’s deputy military intelligence chief, Major General Vadym Skibitskyi, two weeks ago put a Russia-NATO conflict somewhere around 2030. And if the leaks are right, Washington found it urgent enough to fly to Moscow in August 2026. So Ukraine’s intelligence and the American CIA are working from two very different forecasts — if there are any forecasts — four years apart.

What do you personally watch, to work out which of them is closer to the truth — or maybe neither of them is?

— I don’t think we can call anything at the moment, because there are too many shifting things around. Trump is old, Putin is old. Is Putin in trouble in Moscow? I have no idea — I don’t see much news coming out of Moscow that he is, but then again, we don’t see much news coming out of Moscow at the moment. So it’s very difficult to judge.

The only thing we can tell about what’s coming out of Russia at the moment is that a lot of the banks are in trouble, because a lot of companies are overextended — especially the logistics companies and the oil companies, which were overextended to the banks anyway. So there’s a limit to how much money Putin can actually give them to keep them going, because there’s actually quite a strong capitalist system in Russia, with a historically strong banking system over the last twenty-odd years. It’s capitalism — it’s not a government-run country like North Korea, yet. But if it carries on the way it’s going, Russia is heading towards North Korea and a complete command-driven economy, and then goodness knows how it will go. So it could collapse inward, just on the banks alone. Or not.

— Maybe we in the West are just completely unaware of what’s going on in Putin’s head. And maybe he really feels like he’s winning — so the Dnipropetrovsk (ph) region that was fought over and taken back by Ukrainians, he doesn’t know that. Maybe even he doesn’t know, because nobody’s told him. Do you think it takes a whole CIA director flying all the way to Moscow to enforce that on him?

— Nobody would believe it. And remember, the two men Ratcliffe met are both in the FSB. And therefore they are pro-Putin, totally — because if they were not pro-Putin, they’d have either fallen out of a sixth-floor window, or they would never have got the job in the first place. So he’s talking to two acolytes who — there’s no way they’re going to pass anything bad on to Putin. Otherwise, as I say — sixth-floor window, out you go.

— Right. Okay. Do you think that, in general, that proposed meeting between Trump, Putin, and Zelensky — is that complete rubbish to you? And why then would a CIA director put it out publicly like that — what was the reason?

— Everyone knows that’s not the reason. This is like a pretext, maybe — or because he’s working for Trump, and he’s a Trump acolyte.

— Okay — so that was a meeting of acolytes.

— A meeting of acolytes. And therefore he has to lie, to cover up what the real reason is. So you could almost say that wasn’t the real reason — it was something else