How to arrange for WWIII, by the middle-class mums prepping for Putin: Forget pasta and beans. It’s all about wine and wooden. This is precisely what you must be shopping for, freezing and doing to your private home NOW to prepare for struggle

Shelves in the basement are heaped with home-made jam, dried mushrooms, pasta, canned fish, beans, pickled vegetables. Trays of seedlings line the windowsills in the kitchen, and solar panels on the roof provide power, even in winter.

This is the home of Eva Rinblad, 48, a GP who lives on the island of Gotland in Sweden. She and her husband Freke Ekstrand, 60, are thoroughly prepared to survive in a crisis.

If they have to live without running water, they have 6,000 litres stored in water tanks. If fresh food supplies dry up, there will be home-grown veg and produce from the chickens kept penned up outside.

‘Of course you can be prepared without a chicken,’ Eva says, ‘but eggs are nice’.

‘We have enough food to keep us going for months,’ she continues. ‘It would be boring, but we would get by.’ She even has a tub of candy floss for her 11-year-old son.

What’s the emergency you’re preparing for, I ask. ‘Russia is the main concern,’ she says. ‘The biggest crisis is war.’

Gotland, a Swedish holiday island roughly the same size as Cornwall, is just 170 miles from the Russian city of Kaliningrad, the principal base for the Russian Navy’s Baltic Fleet.

The island straddles important sea lanes which run out of St Petersburg and Kaliningrad, eventually leading to the North Sea. Seventy per cent of Russia’s imports and exports pass by Gotland’s coast every day, including liquid gas, fertiliser and oil – along with goods carried by Russia’s ‘shadow fleet’ of tankers trying to evade economic sanctions.

To put it mildly, this is disquieting for an island which disbanded its military units after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

‘The feeling was that it was a peaceful world and we didn’t need to put all this money into defence,’ says Alf Söderman, director of Civil Defence on the island.

By 2005, with the exception of the Home Guard, Gotland was practically undefended. Then Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. Six years later, it annexed Crimea.

But the ‘deal changer’, says Söderman, was Russia’s unprovoked and illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

After 200 years of being a neutral state, Sweden joined Nato in March 2024. And Gotland is now being fortified and remilitarised. The target set by the Swedish government is roughly 5,000 ground troops stationed on the island, plus a Nato integrated missile defence system.

Sweden has a history of being prepared for a crisis. Every year, the government distributes a booklet – ‘Vital information for residents of Sweden’ – with details of how to prepare for an emergency. Typically, the focus is on snowstorms, forest fires, flooding and natural disasters.

But the latest pamphlet warns of ‘cyber attacks, terrorism and sabotage’, and the image on its cover is of a woman dressed in combat fatigues holding a Kalashnikov. ‘The military threat to Sweden has increased,’ it states. ‘We must be prepared for the worst: that another country attacks us with weapons.’

But it’s not just Sweden, of course. UK military chiefs and government ministers have warned the public that we, too, must prepare for a ‘wartime scenario’, and specifically pointed to hostile activity from Russia and Iran. ‘The shadow of war is knocking on Europe’s door once more,’ according to Al Carns, the Armed Forces minister. And readying for war will require an ‘all-of-society effort,’ the UK Government says.

‘Generally, it’s quite disturbing times,’ says Eva, when we meet in her home in Tofta, 20 minutes south of the capital, Visby. Tofta is a tourist destination known for its long stretch of sandy beach and clear blue water. Now, it is also home to a military barracks.

Eva lives with husband, Freke, who works in a bar and distillery, and her son from her first marriage. Her daughter, 17, also from her first marriage, is in high school in Stockholm, where she lives with her father. Eva moved here from Stockholm about 14 years ago.

‘My parents had a holiday home here, and I’ve always loved it. The chance to be close to nature, pick mushrooms in the autumn and grow as much as I like.’

Although she is actively preparing for a cataclysm, the middle-aged mother of two doesn’t look anything like the popular image of a hardcore survivalist.

She is dressed in jeans and a neat jumper and could pass as a school-gate mum from the leafiest suburbs of London.

‘I do not have a bunker. I do not want to live in the woods. I just believe in a healthy level of preparation,’ she says. And there is something unnerving about meeting a woman who is very organised about the threat of war but whom I could easily imagine being a friend from home.

I’m also a middle-aged mother of four – but if you’d asked me what I should be stockpiling, I wouldn’t have a clue beyond candles and a battery-powered radio. Eva has plenty of tips for me, however. Store cupboard staples, such as pasta and beans, will become boring after a while, she tells me. ‘You have to have olive oil, vegetables, a few olives. Wine of course, is storable.’

Her freezer is packed with meat, berries, vegetables and homemade tomato sauce. A wooden crate in the barn is filled with home-grown potatoes buried in sand. ‘It stops them sprouting and drying out,’ she says. Most people, she concedes, don’t have space for a worst-case set-up. She has a couple of barns and a large vegetable patch on her acre of land, plus enough rooms to house dozens of neighbours, in the event of societal collapse.

But people can make their homes more resilient by securing backup power and ‘buying an extra’ tin or two when they go to the supermarket. ‘You can divide a cupboard and pack it neatly and have the essentials,’ Eva says.

‘Putin’s attack on Ukraine was a pivotal moment in realising that we needed to be prepared.’

A local initiative called ‘Stark socken’ – ‘strong village’ – was launched in response to the sudden increase in calls and emails to the island’s Department of Civil Defence after Russia invaded Ukraine. ‘It’s building a local community where you help each other and that is a really important thing, also in peace,’ Eva says.

‘People were asking the same questions: What can I do to feel more safe? What can I do to protect my loved ones and my local community?’ adds Maja Allard, strategist in preparedness and defence for Gotland.

The invasion stirred up a feeling of vulnerability on the island. Gotland largely depends on the Swedish mainland for both food, which arrives by ferry, and power, which comes via a submarine cable system. Water is often in short supply, particularly during summer.

Allard came up with an idea which combined this ‘great urge to do something’ with the island’s mindset of self-sufficiency. At the heart of Stark socken is the message that getting to know your neighbours is often your best protection.

‘Where we see the power is not really in the mapping of resources or great plans, but in the conversations when you sit down with your neighbour and talk about how you can truly help each other,’ says Allard.

From the start it was a success. Embraced by police and fire departments, civil defence organisations and the church, half the island now participates in the initiative: 46 out of 92 parishes, or around 30,000 people.

In December, Allard was invited to speak at the annual forum of EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region. On an organisational level, ‘strong village’ starts with an inventory: who has a wood-burning stove, generator, well, hand pump, and so on. In other words, it builds a local infrastructure, which promotes the social bonding the movement depends on.

Each group is organised in different ways, deciding for themselves when and where to meet. There is a website, lectures, and a leaflet which encourages emergency planning.

The Swedish government recommends an initial stockpile of a week of food, water and power, ‘but if you come together, you can maybe last for 14 days’, says Söderman. ‘That’s the idea of strong village, to extend the time, because that gives people time to adjust to the crisis or war.’

Allard adds: ‘We build our civil defence in layers, from households to national plans and Nato.’

‘If we don’t have strong households, the whole system would crack because that is the ground we are standing on.’

Helena Davidsson, a communications officer for a municipal housing company, moved from Stockholm to Hogrän, a 20-minute drive south from the capital, with her cat, Bessie, three years ago. Also part of the ‘strong village’ plan, Hogrän has 200 inhabitants. If a disaster nears, Helena tells me, the church bell will ring. The assembly point is yet to be confirmed, but it’s likely to be the former barracks.

To be clear, she doesn’t like the idea of ‘war’, and insists ‘to me this is not about Putin’. She is not prepping for violence, she says, but to ‘be without electricity for two or three weeks and to find out how we can help each other’.

Not all households in Hogrän have a wood-burning stove, according to the inventory, meaning that most would be at a severe disadvantage.

‘If the structure goes suddenly, you are very vulnerable. It’s scary,’ says Birgitta Wejde, Helena’s neighbour. ‘People can come to my house,’ says Helena, who has the core comforts of a characteristically Swedish interior: wood-burning stove, oil lamps, candles, rugs on painted floorboards; as well as a water well and a full suite of survival supplies.

She takes me down to her basement where she has a medical kit, paper and pencil, sleeping bag, camping stove, batteries, and a deck of cards. Paracetamol, soap, toothpaste, an electronic lighter, a selection of USB cables, candles, lamp oil and some empty water containers are all there too.

‘If we can’t get water, the municipality will bring water to us and you need something to take it home in’. There is also a pump for ground water flooding, cat food and lots of canned food (hot dogs, ravioli, mackerel fillets, beans, tuna), plus 64 rolls of loo paper.

She also has enough cash for one food shop, as stipulated by the Swedish government. An essential piece of equipment, Helena says, is a wind-up radio to get up-to-date information.

‘Without a radio or a mobile phone you don’t know what’s happening around you.’ She shows me a small, red radio. ‘See how it’s made,’ she says, winding up the nifty mechanism, extending the aerial. It has built-in solar panels, a torch and an alarm. ‘Isn’t it clever,’ she remarks.

We admire its ingenuity, its simple practicality. All the women that I meet have put a lot of effort into prepping and yet find it hard to talk about specific threats.

‘It could be a big power cut and of course that can come from sabotage,’ says Karin Persson, 69, who lives in north Gotland with her husband, a wildlife specialist who works for the Nature Conservation Unit.

And indeed sabotage is probably happening right now, confirms Alf Söderman. Gotland is a target of ‘hybrid warfare’, the grey area between peace and war, and critical undersea cables are a target.

He talks of ‘hacks’ and ‘computer attacks’ and ‘tankers dropping their anchors and dragging them across the bottom of the ocean, ripping power lines’. Last January a Russian-crewed cargo ship called The Silver Dania was detained by Norwegian authorities for ‘suspected acts of sabotage’ after reports that a fibre-optic cable between Gotland and Latvia, crucial for internet access, had been damaged.

There was insufficient evidence and the crew was released.

Unidentified drones have been spotted, says Söderman, ‘looking at Nato movements, testing things’. ‘They are here.’

An invasion is a worst-case scenario, he adds. ‘But being hit with missiles is very possible.’

‘The fundamental thing is to be prepared,’ says Ingela Barnard, 74, founder of a care agency. Now retired, she lives in north Gotland with her husband and has three daughters, aged 44 to 50.

Ingela, who gave up riding her Suzuki Savage motorbike only five years ago, has a year’s worth of wood in the barn and a bottle of 15-year-old Scotch in her store cupboard. Stockpiles are ultimately idiosyncratic.

She still has questions: her husband has a heart condition – will he be allowed more than a two-month supply of drugs? But pharmaceutical supplies do not fall within the mandate of strong village.

Söderman thinks a full-scale war on Gotland is highly unlikely in the near term. ‘But the scary thing is, the day the Ukraine war ends, for whatever reason, it frees up resources for Putin to use elsewhere. We’re talking 700,000 men. What is he going to do with them?’

Meanwhile, Ingela has a daughter who lives in Visby. ‘I asked her yesterday, “What would you do in a crisis?” She said, “I’d bring food and come to you.”’

I’d be tempted to do that too. But I return to England with a shopping list that definitely includes a wind-up radio, phone cables, dark chocolate and a bottle of calvados. I just wish that I’d popped a few jars of delicious homemade Swedish jam in my bag to add to my emergency stash.