A recent report by authored by a Ukrainian thinktank outlines a potential future confrontation between Norway and Russia, and the potential impact of the accompanying electromagnetic battle.
A paper on the Battle of Norway? No, not the one you are probably thinking of which occurred between April and June 1940. The work in question is in fact a recent document discussing a potential future event published by the Sahaidachnyi Security Centre, a Ukrainian defence think tank, and Buntar Aerospace. The Battle of Norway “examines how Russia could challenge Norway across multiple domains (and) identifies critical gaps in Norway’s and NATO’s (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s) existing defence posture” in its own words.
Published in August 2026, the paper is one of several recent publications which imagine the characteristics of a future conflict between NATO and Russia. Other works include Professor Carlo Masala’s If Russia Wins and Armada’s recent 9th May 2028 publication. The hit television series Occupied is another notable edition to this canon, imagining as it does Russian subthreshold activities in northern Norway. In common with these latter works, The Battle of Norway examines aspects of the inevitable spectrum battle that would accompany a conflict between Russia and NATO centred on the Nordic country.
Window of opportunity
The study argues that Norway represents a potentially lucrative target for Russian aggression because of her strategic importance for energy supply, undersea communications and geographical position in the north Atlantic. The report surmises that conflict between Norway and Russia is likely in the 2027 to 2029 timeframe. This represents a window of opportunity for Russia before several major Norwegian defence procurement programmes come to fruition. Ongoing Norwegian defence acquisitions include BAE Systems’ ‘Type 26/City’ class frigates and Lockheed Martin F-35A Lightning fifth generation combat aircraft. Both these platforms are expected to mature between 2029 and 2036.
The Battle of Norway argues that the country’s position as a key NATO member and its geographical location in northern Europe, sharing as it does land and maritime borders with Russia, means the latter is the dominant and immediate near-to-medium term threat. The report notes that, as of 2025, Norway supplied 54 percent of all the European Union’s pipeline natural gas. Norway also hosts termini for such pipelines, undersea telecommunications, and fibre optic and power cables. Other potential Russian targets include civilian and military satellite communications teleports at Platåberget Mount in the northern Svalbard archipelago, and Andøya and Tromsø in northern Norway.
In envisaging the future scenario, the report argues that Russia’s war in Ukraine has failed to deliver the decisive and swift strategic victory Moscow hoped for. With but incremental gains being made by each side on the battlefield the conflict, as of autumn 2026, has primarily become a strategic air campaign: Each belligerent targets the other’s capital and major cities using ballistic missiles, conventional air-to-surface and surface-to-surface missiles and suicide uninhabited aerial vehicles.
Moscow’s window for military action against Norway, and thus NATO, is not only dictated by Oslo’s defence procurement trajectory. Russia’s economic situation gives her perhaps a further four years at best to sustain operations in Ukraine, and to mount a comparatively small-scale action against NATO without serious economic and mobilisation consequences. The report envisages Russian combat operations against Norway encompassing air attacks like those being used against Ukraine, sabotage and political violence, and other so-called ‘hybrid warfare’ activities.
Russia’s war aims could be to deter further NATO assistance to Ukraine, fracture the alliance and force a recognition that Ukraine is, for Moscow, part of Russia’s sphere of influence. To this end, the combat operations discussed above could occur as a prelude to a limited Russian incursion into northern Norway to occupy territory as a ‘bargaining chip’ to force Moscow’s war aims. That said, the report argues that Russian ‘boots on the ground’ in Norway maybe less likely given the ongoing commitment of Moscow to maintain its occupation of parts of Ukraine.
Fighting in the spectrum
From an electromagnetic perspective, the Battle of Norway expects the country to experience significant Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Position, Navigation and Timing (PNT) jamming and spoofing early in any potential confrontation. These attacks are likely to be performed by Russia’s strategic 14Ts227 Tobol GNSS jamming system located Russia’s Kaliningrad Baltic exclave. Additional GNSS PNT disruption, particularly in Norwegian border regions close to Russia, maybe performed by Russian land forces’ operational and theatre-level electronic warfare systems.
These electronic attacks would be undertaken in conjunction with acts of political violence performed by activated sleeper units in Norway, and cyberwarfare. The paper argues that these efforts, likely denied by Moscow or falsely attributed to other actors like Ukraine, would be performed to create maximum confusion within Norway and her NATO allies. Moscow’s priority would be to buy time before any declaration of Article Five of NATO’s founding Atlantic Charter. Article Five pledges the alliance to consider an attack on one member as an attack on all. At this point strikes on subsea infrastructure are likely alongside suicide UAV bombardment against targets like food storage sites with the aim of causing domestic panic.
Eventually, the above phase would enlarge into denser, more widespread air attacks against multiple target sets in Norway. Russia’s EW effort would ramp up at this point as Ground-Based Air Defence (GBAD) assets equipping the Leningrad Military District (MD), the command that would lead the operation against Norway, would seek to extend coverage above northern Norway to frustrate NATO airpower.
As Armada has chronicled in the past, Russian air defence doctrine places a premium on the close integration of land forces’ EW assets with GBAD forces. For example, the Leningrad MD, according to Armada assessments, likely possesses up to 28 S-400 Triumf (NATO reporting name SA-21 Growler) high-altitude surface-to-air missile batteries, according to Armada’s records. These batteries are deployed in circa 14 battalions forming part of the Leningrad MD’s 6th Air Force and Air Defence Army. MD GBAD units are supported by the 328th Independent Electronic Warfare Battalion.
The cross-border EW effort may have the side effect of disrupting unsecured Norwegian military communications and could cause extensive disruption to local civilian cellular networks. This disruption could have the added impact of hampering the work of local emergency services using cellular or standard TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio) communications both of which may be less resilient to concerted electronic attack. This vulnerability could potentially threaten Norway’s fifth-generation cellular bandwidths the government reserves for emergency military use in times of crisis. Another concern regarding cellular communications denial is Norway’s Nødvarsel national alert system which uses cellular links to disseminate warning messages to the population.
Be warned!
The Battle of Norway is a valuable publication because of the scenarios it imagines, and their accompanying electromagnetic characteristics. Nonetheless, many of its predictions regarding hypothetical Russian operations, and EW therein, would be applicable to other European NATO members regardless of their proximity to Russia. The work is a timely addition to a growing, yet useful, canon daring to ask unpalatable questions about the potential complexion of a future European war with Russia.
by Dr. Thomas Withington
