What if Russian jets shoot down a NATO aircraft over the Baltic?
Russia downing a NATO aircraft over the Baltic pushes the alliance toward direct retaliation: VIX +16, Nasdaq -7, Lockheed +2 as defense bids against the selloff. Like the 2015 Turkey shootdown of a Russian Su-24, which spiked tensions but stayed contained because Turkey acted alone, not Article 5. Transmission is European risk and defense order books. Forward angle: a NATO-flagged loss is harder to localize than the 2015 bilateral case, so the escalation distribution is wider and the dip riskier to buy.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 0–6 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Russian jets down a NATO aircraft over the Baltic, forcing the alliance toward direct retaliation. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Defense spending ▲ · Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.