A Russian military expert on air defence appeared on the television channel of the parliamentary assembly of Russia and Belarus and explained that the West is planning for Germany to replace Ukraine in the war against Moscow. The year he named is 2030. That is the year Vladimir Putin's current term expires.

Yuri Knutov claims Berlin is rapidly turning into Europe's main military centre and that a militarist spirit thought to have been suppressed after the Second World War is reawakening among Germans.

„The danger that the Germans will fight against us is very serious. The year 2030 is being mentioned. There will be elections in Russia then, President Putin's term expires and new elections will need to be held. They want to time everything for exactly that moment“, he said.

Read that sentence again

According to the same expert, Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries, logistics hubs and trading platforms are also timed - to stir discontent among the population ahead of September's State Duma elections. So German rearmament and the strikes on refineries all unfold according to the Russian electoral calendar.

That is an analysis in which every event in the world just happens to revolve around one date in Moscow. When somebody explains that Berlin, Kyiv and Washington are all working to a schedule that coincides with the Russian electoral cycle, it is worth asking which channel he is saying it on and who put him in the studio.

But the numbers are real

And here it gets more complicated. Because the part that is not speculation - German rearmament - is genuinely happening, and at a pace Europe has not seen in decades.

Germany has budgeted roughly 108 billion euros for defence in 2026. By 2035 Berlin plans to have more than 260,000 active soldiers and approximately 200,000 reservists. From 2026, all eighteen-year-olds receive questionnaires on their readiness to serve, and from July 2027 men born in 2008 and later will have to undergo compulsory medical examinations.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz has said the Bundeswehr must become the strongest conventional army in Europe. That is not a Russian interpretation - it is an official German objective.

Both things can be true at once

Moscow has an interest in presenting German rearmament as preparation for attack, because it justifies its own war economy. Berlin officially maintains the aim is deterring Russia and strengthening NATO. Neither side is a neutral narrator.

What is left once you strip away both interpretations is simpler and harder. Europe's largest economy, a country that spent eighty years building an identity around not being a military power, has set itself the published goal of fielding the continent's strongest army. Compulsory medical examinations for boys born in 2008 are not one Russian analyst's theory - they are scheduled.

The Balkans have a long memory for what it means when Europe's great powers start counting reservists. You do not need to believe Knutov to notice that the continent is arming faster than it is talking about it.