Is anyone at all worried about Russia retaliating directly against America for all this success? The U.S. media loves gloating about this kind of stuff but it seems gratuitous at best.
It has become clear that Russia had no capacity to wage war in Ukraine and take on anyone else in a meaningful way. As long as pot boils, but doesn’t spill over the USA will be able to continue to slowly increase its support.
Also noteworthy is the fact that the support from US in particular and NATO in general has been decades-old and potentially decommissioned hardware that was either mothballed or phased out, and the overall investment, with regards to each nation's budget, amounts to pocket change.
No.
Direct retaliation would mean the end of the Putin regime.
Total financial aid to Ukraine from the US over the last 21 months has amounted to $77 billion so far. About $30 billion or so more has been appropriated but has not been spent yet.
That is a lot of money, but the amount spent so far is only ~0.3% of the US's GDP and ~5.4% of its annual Federal Budget-- spread out over nearly 2 years.
With that, and contributions from other allies roughly doubling that total, Ukraine has fought Russia to a standstill and is very slowly gaining ground.
Any direct conventional retaliation against the United States would bring to bear a much, much, larger percentage of its resources and very likely result in the complete annihilation of any involved forces. Russian forces are very poorly equipped, trained, and led which means there have been single weeks (particularly the last several weeks) in the War in Ukraine where more Russian losses occurred than occurred in total over 20 years of US involvement in the Global War on Terror.
So that leaves a nuclear response.
A nuclear response would end in the annihilation of Russia itself. The Putin regime seems very interested in self-preservation.
That leaves indirect proxy responses. Historically, proxy wars against the United States have not ended well for either the proxy or the supporter of the proxy.
Even proxies who "win" are often damaged to the point of ruin, taking decades to recover.
If anything, some of these will end up saving the U.S. money because maintenance and eventual disposal would have been far more expensive than shipping it to Ukraine.
To put that in more direct terms: that's $77 billion over 21 months, spread across around 168 million US taxpayers. That comes out to $21.83/month per taxpayer.
Cognisant of, yes. Worried, no. For the same reasons we aren’t sending a carrier strike group to bomb Crimea. To the extent there is a media circus in this fight, it’s around pandering to Russian escalation theatre.
What are you thinking they might try?
Do you know how expensive their maintenance is? Do you know how corrupt Russia is?
Either way, you can’t call their bluff without risking nuclear annihilation. All it takes is a few dozen MIRV tipped IC/SL ballistic missiles to bypass anti missile systems and destroy a good chunk of the US population.
China, maybe. The difference is that Chinese nukes are relatively new. How old are Russia's nukes? 40 years old? 60? You do know that nukes are extremely finicky. Getting a nuke to detonate is a highly precise thing.
Are you actually assuming that they will not work? That's quite the leap of faith with no substance to back it up
1. knocked a US drone out of the air, and the US did not escalate
2. Fired two air-to-air missiles at a UK spy plane, due to miscommunication. One missed, one failed
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Black_Sea_drone_incident
Pushing the limit with attacks near the Polish or Romanian borders.
Aggressive agitation / Agit-Prop efforts in the US. Likely pushing the MAGA GOP Republicans to obstruct obstruct obstruct, and doing things like not confirming high ranking generals.
Efforts via Wagner in Africa, and leaning on Middle Eastern powers to take action as things get hotter w/r/t Israel and Palestine. This has seen attacks on US bases in the Middle East, albeit without tremendous impacts.
Russia can't really take direction action since now Finland is NATO, and there are tons of NATO, to include US, UK, French, Canadian, et al, forces in Poland, the Baltics, and now Finland. Russia has, at best, token forces blocking most of those borders. They still have some gear in reserve in case NATO gets involved -- not a lot of call for AShMs in Ukraine, for example -- but even then there isn't much stopping NATO forces from driving straight into St. Pete's or Pskov.
The Soviet Union literally collapsed.
What do you perceive as "this degree"?
I mean, Ukraine's endgame is to free its occupied territories from Russia's occupation. This means that Russia's worst-case outcome is doing yet another goodwill gesture, pack up and leave, and claim they succeeded in whatever was they claimed their goal was.
All the redline arguments regarding NATO expansion and bullshit about protecting Russian speaking segments of the population were already thoroughly discredited and abandoned, and more importantly Putin's regime didn't even objected to them.
In the meantime, Putin's regime seems to have its populace under tight control to the point they have pundits openly calling out in Russia's own mass media for the death of any Russian citizen not supporting Putin's regime without causing any backlash.
So where is this existential threat you're talking about?
All the harm that was lingering over Putin's regime was already done. Russia's economy is in shambles, Russia's diplomatic standing ceased to be, Russia switched from a world player to a vassal state of China and Iran, and is already being subservient to North Korea. Russia's arms industry also took a major reputation hit. Russia also lost Europe as a energy cliënt, which was basically it's diplomatic and economic support.
At this point the only options on Russia's table is to either continue following the sunk loss fallacy path, or cutting its losses. Which one is supposed to be the wall?
I'm honestly not sure but I'm also not sure we have ever seen a nuclear power with its back against the wall to this degree have we? I'm not trying to make people worried it's just something I personally worry about.
Nuclear powers (including Russia and the USSR) have lost wars before so I’m not sure how they are backed against a wall.
They can always just leave.