> But they have no economical & military power to really do any harm the Europe & the US. Putin makes a lot of noise but really can't even win a few km's in Ukraine.
Let's see how the situation in Avdiivka develops in the next few weeks. Ukraine is reinforcing the area, but it doesn't look good.
We've seen plenty of blunders by the russian army. But you should not underestimate your enemy.
Putin (and the Russian (leaderhsip) culture in general, see Stalin) is this:
What are a 100M (of our) people dead if we own Ukraine/Baltics/East Poland/Georgia/... for the next hundreds of years?
Stalin had the same blunders, thats priced in, the Red Army had meat wave attacks in WW2 and lost millions, but achived all it's war goals (Poland, Baltics, Eastern Europe including half of Germany - only the US achieved all it's war goals too, everyone else lost, sadly Poland had the biggest loss).
People have been steadily getting poorer thanks to inflation eating their stagnating wages combined with skyrocketing consumer and housing prices and the birthrate keeps dropping.
Poor people had plenty of kids because they had no standards nor accessible birth control or they come from a conservative religious culture where having kids is the norm.
But once people taste the good life, like westerners had it so good a while a ago, they don't want to bring kids in economic conditions worse than before, so the poorer you make them, the less kids they'll have.
So to compensate, you don't focus on improving the conditions for the locals to convince them to procreate, but you open the immigration gates to people from poor places with no standards, happy to bring kids in conditions that are way better than what they have in their own country, even though they're worse than the locals had a few decades ago.
He absolutely increased poverty levels, education is in extremely sharp decline, propaganda is thriving, and he started to fight birth control (so far, emergency contraception only).
And I must remind that Russia is having an electoral event this March, so the repressions were temporarily put on a back burner - but unpopular changes will come shortly afterwards. Check back in May or June.
Considering the USSR partnered with Nazi Germany to invade and split up Poland, yes, the Red Army was definitely the aggressor. There's also a school of thought amongst historians that if Germany hadn't attacked the USSR in 1941, the Soviets would have been prepared to attack Germany.
There is prehistory[1] to Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, and simply labelling Red Army as the aggressor instead of considering political actions of every EU state is injustice to sanity as well as ignoring prehistory of 2022 escalation.
Really not sure what you're rambling about mixing up the EU with Red Army stuff or "injustice to sanity". Poland had existed for centuries before being dismembered in the 18th Century. Reconstituted after WW1, it was a fully recognized and sovereign country with its own language and culture. The fact that it had the misfortune to lie between Russia and the Hapsburg/Prussian states.
Let's see how the situation in Avdiivka develops in the next few weeks. Ukraine is reinforcing the area, but it doesn't look good.
We've seen plenty of blunders by the russian army. But you should not underestimate your enemy.