Russia defeated NATO, captured Swedish island in secret war games: What went wrong in Ukraine war?

Russian generals secretly practised fighting NATO in computer-simulated wars, including a scenario involving the strategically important Swedish island of Gotland, according to a new investigation.

The war games were held at Russia's General Staff Military Academy in Moscow, where senior officers were divided into teams and asked to fight large-scale virtual conflicts.

Some of the exercises involved more than 1,000 officers taking part from different military institutions across Russia.

One game held in March 2017 appears to have simulated a major conflict in the Baltic Sea, according to the Dossier Center, a Russian investigative group which uncovered details of the secret exercises.

A military map from the exercise showed the Baltic region, with a particular object marked around Gotland: Sweden's largest island and a strategically important position in the middle of the Baltic Sea.

Gotland sits roughly 330 kilometres from Russia's Kaliningrad region and has long been considered important for controlling movement across the Baltic.

The Russian officers weren't simply moving pieces around a normal map.

Special military software recreated troops, weapons and terrain, while computers calculated losses and how far forces managed to break through enemy defences.

Officers playing the enemy side were also expected to behave according to NATO military doctrine.

The investigation suggests Russian commanders had been seriously gaming out the possibility of a conflict with NATO by at least 2017.

Russia wasn't only looking west.

Another exercise in 2018 simulated a war involving the United States and Japan, with more than 320,000 virtual troops taking part.

Ukraine then began appearing much more frequently in Russian military simulations before Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion in February 2022. By 2021, exercises involving a possible operation against Ukraine were reportedly being held almost every month.

The simulations didn't necessarily predict what happened on the real battlefield.

The Dossier Center also cautioned that practising such a scenario does not by itself mean Russia had made a decision to attack NATO or seize Gotland.