“And Russia has a bottomless inexhaustible stockpile, is that it?”
Read up a bit on the Soviet ground forces. Unlike the West, Russia didn’t believe in “The End of History”, so they held on to their huge inventories...which are basically inexhaustible for a war as small as Ukraine.
Ok, if you need to claim that, then so be it.
Bob, do you not see a contradiction? The Europeean “West” seeing the “end of history” and not spending money on defense, Putin thinking it wasn’t over, and America maintaining its military spending to a level higher than the whole of Western Europe put together?
Perhaps Russia under Putin never accepted the Cold War (with the USA) was over, and Putin was well aware that NATO in Europe posed no threat to Russia on its own.
Doesn’t that suggest he started a proxy war in Ukraine because he wanted to attack Europe while it was weak, and that’s why his warnings to NATO in December 2021 were drafted as if the only NATO country Russia cared about was the USA?