> And that's with maybe using 20% of Russias military capacity.
Let's not fool ourselves here: if there was a way for Putin to avoid looking like an idiot who struggles to take even parts of Ukraine he would take it.
Truth is he failed spectacularily and everyone who has the slightest idea can see for themselves that Russia is struggling mightily despite their initial backstab where they had a few hours to bomb Ukraine and insert troops at will despite their promises the night before.
They fail despite having multiple influential politicians who they had bribed in advance, multiple sleeper cells, and, on the paper, a much much stronger army.
He has already sent the troops that was supposed to protect the strategically important Murmansk area, proving 1.) The Ukraine invasion is massively important to him 2.) He also proved all the words about being afraid of Nato is just a waste of perfectly fine silence, as he knows perfectly well that Nato is mostly peaceful and has not intention of invading or nuking Russia. After all he removed these troops while Nato, Sweden and Finland was gathering lots of troops right across the border :-D
> All according to western sources.
Someone dubbed Heissentruths, truths whose exact value cannot be known until you open the box.
Russians and their friends has a lot of Heissentruths. Western media being a reliable source is one of these. In this case it is absolutely true and very reliable, in another case were they point out the Russian attempts at genocide they are of course absolutely unreliable and only fools would refer to them.
Edit:
If Nato joins the conflict, Russian authorities only hope is their strategic weapons.
And given what we have seen about how well the kleptocracy maintains their conventional weapons I am somewhat less worried about that then what I was in February/March.
I have a feeling they too have noted this as I hear less and less mentions of this option from them, so it is either that they have realized the red button won't work or they are preparing a surprise.