In WW2 80% of Russian soldiers never returned home.
All of these Putina lovers have some distorted view that the Russian army is somehow a modern impervious force to be reckoned with. They have never ever considered human life as precious, especially their own soldiers. They haven’t won a major war by themselves in well over a century.
Sure bombs and nukes are deterrents. But a useless conscript army of teens who’d rather be at a bar or disco and are constantly being lied to will wither away in a real fight.
Putin needs a cease fire as much as Ukraine at this point.
Why did we have 500,000 men in Vietnam? Why did we have hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan for twenty years? When did Vietnam or Iraq (not Saudi Arabia) attack Kansas? Off hand guess, in the last hundred years 90% of soldiers actually fighting are NOT warding off invaders of the motherland. But to your point, the number one reason Putin is doing this is because Ukraine was possibly going to become a NATO member. I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember the Warsaw Pact. If you are, would Mexico becoming a Warsaw Pact member in 1980 satisfy your prerequisite for the US Army to fight aggressively? Same difference. For that matter, why do we still have NATO after Reagan destroyed the Warsaw Pact? I know if I were a Russian and the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact were 30 years dead, I’d be asking that question.
[Russian army unleashed? I wonder what their motivation would be? It’s not like when Germany invaded and the whole country took up arms (like what’s happening in the Ukraine right now) so I don’t think Russian soldiers would be highly motivated; OTOH, the Ukrainians sure are.
In WW2 80% of Russian soldiers never returned home. ]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan
Russians who wanted to avoid the mass graves Hitler planned for them had to fight. In WW1, when they were fighting Germany over bits of land, the Russians started to collapse when they started to take serious casualties. Hitler’s mistake was to confuse the Russian unwillingness to die in large numbers over real estate in WW1 for a willingness to be exterminated to the last man, woman and child without resisting.