Admiral Igor Kostyukov, director of Russia's GRU military intelligence, has laid out in striking detail which European-based weapons systems Moscow fears most - and which Russian cities and military assets they could destroy. The rare public disclosure appeared in the May 2025 issue of Military Thought, the Russian Defense Ministry's main journal, as "Hvylya" reports, citing a new Carnegie Endowment analysis that examined the article.

Kostyukov warned that Finland's NATO membership has nearly doubled Russia's land border with the alliance - from 1,480 km to 2,800 km. Weapons deployed on Finnish territory, he wrote, "will be able to strike at critically important objects in the northwest part of the Russian Federation." If Finland acquires ATACMS missiles with a range of up to 300 km, the Northern Fleet, St. Petersburg, Murmansk, Petrozavodsk, and both the Leningrad and Kola nuclear power stations would all fall within striking range.

The GRU chief did not need to spell out why the Northern Fleet matters so much. Carnegie analyst Eugene Rumer notes that the fleet's order of battle includes eight of Russia's estimated fourteen ballistic missile submarines - the backbone of Moscow's nuclear second-strike capability. A threat to these assets strikes at the heart of Russia's strategic deterrent.

Kostyukov's article reflects what Rumer describes as a pattern stretching back nearly half a century. In the 1980s, Soviet Chief of the General Staff Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov warned that new Western conventional weapons could pose threats comparable to nuclear arms. Those warnings, Rumer writes, "continued to fuel the threat perceptions of a beleaguered Russian military" long after the Soviet collapse - and their "reverberations" are now clearly visible in Kostyukov's analysis.

The GRU director also identified Ukraine as the "main threat" to Russia - a designation that, combined with his detailed mapping of NATO vulnerabilities, suggests Moscow sees itself encircled by hostile capabilities from the Kola Peninsula to the Black Sea. Russia is now confronting what Rumer calls "yet another revolution in warfare" involving short- and long-range drones, autonomous systems, and AI-assisted weapons, many built with components accessible to both state and nonstate actors.

Previously: GPS Under Attack: Baltic States Hit by 22-Fold Surge in Russian Signal Jamming.