Rarely does a piece of television docu-drama land in the middle of an unfolding real-world crisis as squarely as Sky’s The Wargame.
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piece → land → Wargame
Even as the first episode opened with an all-star cast of former British ministers, generals and MI6 officers contemplating their response to a fictional Kremlin grey-zone attack on the UK, French President Emmanuel Macron summoned party leaders to an emergency meeting to discuss urgent intelligence warnings of possible Russian aggression.
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Macron → open → aggression
Just days before, Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk warned his parliament that intelligence assessments suggested Russia might launch an attack with drones or missiles on Nato territory “in the coming months.”
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Russia → warn → months
Poland’s veteran Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski doubled down, warning Russia that Nato’s air superiority could destroy Russia’s oil refining capacity within days in the event of any attempted invasion of the Baltics.
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superiority → double → Baltics
Nato’s response would “not just be defensive,” warned Sikorski.
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Sikorski → warn → ?
The day after Denmark’s intelligence service warned of a “low but growing risk” that Russia could launch a limited military attack against one or more Nato countries bordering Russia, Sweden and Finland scrambled fighter jets to intercept and identify Russian military aircraft over the Gulf of Finland, in their first such joint operation.
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Sweden → warn → operation
Sky’s The Wargame is a drama – but one based on years of research by the showrunner, Sky News' Security and Defence Editor Deborah Haynes.
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Wargame → base → showrunner
The cast is also made up of ministers, generals and MI6 officers with real, recent experience at the highest levels of the British and US states.
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cast → make → states
Former Nato Secretary General George Robertson plays himself, while former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci takes the role of US Secretary of State.
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Scaramucci → play → State
Many elements of the drama ring very true.
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elements → ring → drama
Most important is the fact that the Russian attack comes as an escalating series of hybrid operations – sabotage and assassination attacks that fall below an identifiable threshold for triggering Nato’s Article 5 collective security clause.
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that → come → clause
Britain’s inability to deter a Russian attack, to defend itself when it comes, or to properly respond also tracks with reported reality.
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it → deter → reality
Military chiefs tell the political leaders there is "bugger all" military capacity available because so many aircraft, destroyers and submarines are out of action or in maintenance.
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aircraft → tell → maintenance
Another telling moment came as viewers watch the politicians gathered in the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms – more dramatically known as COBR – backtrack on years of belligerent anti-Russian rhetoric the moment that words turn into sticks and stones; ‘Deputy PM’ played by Nicola Sturgeon instead blames ‘Foreign Secretary’ Jim Murphy's diplomacy for taking Britain to the verge of annihilation.
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PM → come → annihilation
The entire show is based on a real-life April 2024 Sky News report by Haynes on the alarming fact that Whitehall officials were combing through the Cabinet Office’s Government War Book – Cold War-era records of Nato's biannual Winter Exercises and Civil-Military Exercise, discontinued in 1990 – for clues on how to transition Britain to war readiness.
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officials → base → readiness
Out in the real world, war-games, whether played out around a conference table or on the ground as military exercises, happen all the time.
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games → play → exercises
In the two most recent boots-on-the-ground war-games Nato forces were seriously put to the test by Ukrainian veteran drone operators playing the ‘Red’ – read Russian – team.
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forces → put → team
In both the Hedgehog exercise played out in Estonia in May 2025 and Aurora 26, involving 18,000 Nato troops in Sweden this April–May, a handful of experienced drone pilots inflicted devastating damage.
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handful → play → damage
In this instance, Anatoliy Merkotun, commander of the Ukrainian Nemesis unit in Aurora 26, said Nato's habit of keeping vehicles and troops in compact groups looked “nearly suicidal”, a way of fighting both Russia and Ukraine had “abandoned years ago.”
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way → say → Russia
Meanwhile a host of Western armies and military think tanks – notably the US Naval War College, the Pentagon's Joint Staff, and US European Command and Strategic Commands, plus the UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and the Defence Academy – constantly play out war-game scenarios to test readiness.
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host → play → readiness
A war-game exercise organised by the German newspaper Die Welt and the Helmut Schmidt University of the German Armed Forces last December envisaged a scenario where the Kremlin used bogus claims of a “humanitarian crisis” in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad to seize the Lithuanian city of Marijampole.
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Kremlin → organise → Marijampole
Within days, in that war-game, an absence of US leadership and hesitancy from Nato countries allowed Moscow to gain total control over the Baltic within days, using an initial force of only 15,000 troops.
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Moscow → allow → troops
“The Russians achieved most of their goals without moving many of their own units,” Bartłomiej Kot, a Polish security analyst who acted as the Polish prime minister, told The Wall Street Journal.
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who → achieve → Journal
“What this showed to me is that once we are confronted by the escalatory narrative from the Russian side, we have it embedded in our thinking that we are the ones who should be de-escalating.”
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who → show → thinking
The results of official military war-games are rarely made public.
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results → make → games
But, says a senior European diplomat who still acts as a national security adviser to a major Nato country, “these games are nothing like the real world and actually not designed to be so.”
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games → say → world
Rather, the idea of official war-games is to stress-test specific national systems, military or political – and therefore exclude outside variables that in real life would be crucial.
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that → test → life
“What will be the effect of your diplomacy or your military actions on your adversary – this is outside the scope of the game,” says the diplomat.
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diplomat → say → game
“Ultimately you can only test yourself.”
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you → test → yourself
An upcoming example of such a practical preparedness test is Britain’s Exercise Albiston Shadow in 2027, billed as the largest UK home defence exercise in several decades, with ministers and hundreds of officials testing emergency responses to hybrid attacks.
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ministers → bill → attacks
But what Sky’s The Wargame does not address is the most important question of all – how to cut through the fog of misunderstanding, rhetoric and paranoia which is the seed-bed of a brewing showdown with Russia.
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which → address → Russia
On the one hand, it is provably true that Russia’s security agencies have been stepping up arson and sabotage attacks on European and British soil – including the most alarming yet, a failed explosive drone attack earlier this summer on Ukrainian planes in Germany’s Leipzig airport.
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agencies → step → airport
On the other, intelligence chiefs in the Baltic states say that, in reality, they have no reason to believe that Russia is actually planning an armed incursion against Nato.
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Russia → say → Nato
“We don’t see indications of an imminent attack,” Normunds Mežviets, director of the VDD, Latvia’s state security service, told The Guardian last week.
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Mežviets → see → Guardian
And Jonatan Vseviov, secretary-general of Estonia’s foreign ministry, decried “panic on social media” in recent days about a possible attack, noting that “if there is reason to fear an attack, rest assured: we will make that clear.
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that → decry → attack
Until then, keep calm, carry on and support Ukraine.”
One major problem is that shows like The Wargame, as well as the recent vague warnings from European leaders about rising security threats from Russia, actually serve the Kremlin’s purposes.
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shows → keep → purposes
“Scaremongering is a Kremlin psy-op,” argues Ed Lucas, founder and director of the Baltic International Security Centre.
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Lucas → argue → Centre
The Kremlin is “trying to spread FUD – Fear Uncertainty Doubt – and far too many supposedly expert voices are amplifying this,” Lucas warned on Twitter.
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Lucas → try → Twitter
Objectively, the Russian army has suffered catastrophic losses of up to half a million killed over the last four years and has so far failed to even take all of Donbas or more than 23% of Ukraine.
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army → suffer → Ukraine
A war-game that pits the Kremlin’s entire strength against the comparatively tiny Baltic nations – or for that matter against Britain’s hollowed-out army and navy and dysfunctional government bureaucracy – might see a hypothetical win for Moscow within those artificial parameters.
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that → pit → parameters
…and 16 more, not listed.
The Aporia
