In the media age of Trumpian hyperbole and screaming memes on social media, the warning is easy to dismiss and even overlook.
What was startling (at least to me) was that it was coming out of the mouth of one of Europe's leading politicians.
It came as Pistorius spoke in a wide-ranging interview with CBC News while visiting Canada at the end of May.
But then this week the other shoe dropped.
In remarks published Wednesday, Generalleutnant Christian Freuding, the inspector of the German Army, said the 2029 date was not a figure pulled out of thin air by his government's national security establishment, but an actual consensus view among Western allies.
"We have to be ready to fight," Freuding is quoted as saying by the publication Deutsche Welle. "It's intelligence, it's NATO co-ordinated. All 32 NATO partners agree that Russia could have the ability to invade a NATO partner country in 2029."
And if both Pistorius and Freuding's sobering assessments weren't enough, an investigative report by the Danish public broadcaster DR published this week revealed military intelligence agencies from several Nordic countries have mapped out Russia's active expansion of defence infrastructure and hardware along its northwestern frontier.
Their assessment states Moscow is prepared to deploy up to 115,000 troops directly along NATO's northern and Baltic borders to rebuild its bases for future Baltic Sea conflict.
And what is the window for such a buildup? One to three years.
