We exploit the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine as a shock to anti-Russia attitudes in Spain. Our data includes the 1986 Spanish NATO referendum, monthly surveys with voting and pro-war attitudes, and political speeches in Congress. We use two empirical strategies, a continuous differences-in-differences estimation and
a repeated cross-section model including a large set of controls, to see the political effects of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in Spain according to historic support for NATO. We find that the Russia-Ukraine conflict increased by around 5pp the current intention to vote for the center-right (Partido Popular--PP) among the individuals in municipalities that strongly supported NATO in the 1986 referendum. We argue that the Russian invasion of Ukraine—the second largest Soviet republic—has heightened NATO’s prominence, reviving
its historical role in the US-Russia conflict. Hence, these pro-NATO attitudes measured in 1986 channel anti-Russian sentiments (derived from the anti-Soviet origins of NATO). As a matter of fact, in those municipalities, individuals have lower ``sympathy" for Russia and stronger perception of the country as a military threat. Finally, the increase in the voting intention for the PP goes hand in hand with the legislators' narrative in Congress: after the invasion, PP legislators are more likely to mention Russia in their speeches, and when they do, they talk more negatively about it. In this setting, we do not find evidence that support for NATO reflects different opinions of the Spanish citizens, such as pro-military attitudes or a general mood for supranational integration.