They’ve had 30 years to prepare for this; instead they sold many of their conventional weapons decades ago to raise foreign cash reserves.
You mean the russians. The russians sold what they would need to win a real war, not this tiny prelude.
NATO let their fighting forces decay due to neglect. 300,000 Germans and 200,000 French should be ready to march, being worked by constant exercies.... French might be able to put out 30,000 troops and germans might be able to get 15,000. Polish might have 45,000 ready to go.
That 90,000 EU not british, canadian, US group should walk all over 200,000 russian conscripts and 20,000 professional soilders. UK and US troops are the crediable threat while on the Polish boarder against Belarus. The supply line is rail and and a modern highway system all the way to combat zone. It is commercial delivery to get everything in place in time for summer killing season.
It is not world war III by parking all these forces within 100 km of the ukraine, poland, balkin boarder and digging out the armillary of the cold war. All while putting aircraft back on 1983 duties and keeping russian war planners and day to day opeartions busy. The turks and the kurds need to get over it and look to the north as the threat.
The Turks and Kurds have the most to gain if they can play the game and just move like they care about this conflict. Truely with everything to the west lining up, India and China will get spicy by doing nothing to Russia.
Putin thinks the whole world is against him, at least line up in a conventional manner so he has doubts. He has nuclear exchange doubts or he would have come much harder at Ukraine. Putin is counting on the politics of the EU to let this one slide, odds are...it will.
The crime is the international community ignoring 2014-today.
Ukraine should have emulated Switzerland. Instead it’s a used car dealership.