Eh, Putin is primarily interested in taking over old USSR territory and restoring Russia to their former power. Even he isn’t dumb enough to intentionally fire a bullet at a NATO member, as it would not go well in his favor. Sure, they have nukes, but a lot has changed in the last ~40 years. It isn’t even certain his nukes could hit many of their critical targets before being shot down or have their guidance systems meddled with. I’m not sure he could even really rely on China backing him up, as they wouldn’t see much value in going head to head with NATO. They’re much more inclined towards the long term strategy that’s been working quite well for them so far.
With that being said, I hope I’m not proven wrong. War is horrific and I truly wish for me and my offspring to never see the day another world war breaks out.
Even he isn’t dumb enough to intentionally fire a bullet at a NATO member, as it would not go well in his favor.
Yet. That’s the problem with his behaviour and the reason why we need to see this as a lead up. He’s pushing boundaries, testing our resolve, finding cracks and stoking divisions. He’s not going to attack a NATO member yet, but sooner or later he will find the right time, the right member, to strike and expose our weakness.
Putler can’t even keep his logistics together 150km from his own border
His professional army is gone, it’s all conscripts and poorly trained mercs from Africa and the Indian subcontinant
His modern armour is gone, Russia is fielding T-55s to cover losses
He has been denied air superiority over the combat theatre by 40 year old soon-to-be-retired weaponry
A third of the black sea fleet is at the bottom of the black sea and was put there by a country with no navy…
He wont do shit, he cant do shit…
All this and NATO havent even turned up yet
Yeah, no. Has Russia taken a lot of fatalities? Yeah. But they’re also a huge country and a lot of what they’ve “lost” has to some extent areas where they’d consider the population expendable.
The thing is, while NATO etc bicker about supplying Ukraine - while fighting against internal sabotage by Russia’s unspoken allies - they’ve been actively working on a functional war-economy and production, as well as arrangements with regimes such as Iran etc.
The West has this far been in the “send some older hardware but only for defence” mode, which is just recently, slowly turning around. Committing actual troops to war is not so much, and the militaries of many members have been grossly neglected for decades. Russia continues to push the line of “you don’t want nuclear war, do you?” while also actively preparing for a larger scale conflict and pushing boundaries They, and China, Iran etc have also been increasingly active in technological/cyber attacks. Eventually, I fully expect them to go for broke. This probably won’t actually start at another invasion but rather as increasing/coordinated infrastructure attacks on infrastructure and technology.
