In 2014 Russia annexed Crimea, and the world shrugged. The prediction was more stark, that Russia would attempt to march straight across Ukraine and invade Poland and Moldova. So far that appears to be their intent, though they got hung up in eastern Ukraine (see: Russia's demographic decline being too advanced to field an effective army).
You need more than people to field an effective army. You need to equip them and lead them in an effective way. To go back almost 100 years, Mussolini in Italy used to boast to have 8 million bayonets [1]. We know the results.
That's part of the demographic issues that Russia has, though. The science & engineering talent needed to keep their military machine going is all of Soviet vintage, meaning they entered their careers before 1991. They are all in their 50s at a minimum now, retiring within the next 10 years, and with Russian life expectancy for males at 65, may die shortly after.
The 1990s were a lost generation for Russia, and then talented young engineers that came of age in the 2000s and 2010s largely went into more lucrative software jobs. Many emigrated to the West; I work with a number of them. The folks who can keep all the old military hardware running (let alone develop new ones) are getting increasingly old, and won't be around much longer.
Poland has been in NATO for a while now; non-starter unless he wanted WW3. And those would be NATO regulars in the mix, not kelptocrats in NATO hand-me-downs.
two years ago NATO seemed to be an organisation in shambles, with no mission and no purpose.... Kremlin's propaganda even said - Do you really expect Germans and French to come and fight for some backward eastern european country ?
The resolution and unity displayed by NATO members surprised everybody, even the NATO members themselves
It was basically a shrug; for instance the 2014 invasion wasn't enough to cancel NS-2. Lots of people, Europeans particularly, continued to do business with Russia. In doing so, they were funding the full scale invasion that followed. Only after Feb 2022 did the international community get a bit more serious about sanctioning Russia.
Also the shrug at 2014 wasn't unprecedented. The world also shrugged when Russia invaded Georgia 6 years before that in 2008.
Georgia and Russia are UN signatories. Invasion is still expressly illegal.
If we make excuses, that aggressive wars of conquest to expand borders and subjugate people is sometimes OK - inevitably leads to "the world does not deserve peace".
It really is throw the baby out with the bathwater, because the document everyone agreed to while bodies were still rotting, says aggression must be stopped so it doesn't spread.
Apparently the past does not effectively speak to the present, that people still think its OK to negotiate with tyranny. Cutting a deal that involves giving up on millions of people just to save your own skin is what damns humanity, and should damn it, straight to hell.
Humans volunteering other humans are scum. It's unconscionable to me the degree of apathy involved. The willingness to try to bribe tyranny with other people's land, lives, their fucking children.
The potentially fatal flaw of the UN charter isn't the obligation of all members to stop any aggression. It was never even slightly imagined that a founding member, and permanent member of the Security Council, would conduct a war of conquest. And so now the Security Council is rendered useless.
Poland has an article 51 right to aid Ukraine in collective defense. They can send ground troops. They can send and launch long range weapons. Moscow is a legitimate military target.
We are here because of every inaction that came before.
What does this have to do with the point that the US and EU did in fact essentially shrug at the 2014 invasion of Ukraine? Are you disagreeing with that?
But isnt the war ongoing since 2014?