It doesn’t concern me the dollar value of armaments being sent to Ukraine because like, “fighting Russia to prevent them from recovering geopolitical influence and mass they lost in 1991” was always what those armaments were for! What, we’re not going to have them to use on Russian tanks in the future? Russia won’t have the tanks they were used on!
Really it seems like a successful version of what we tried in Iraq or Afghanistan, or “Vietnamization”: we provide the materiel to achieve our goals, but someone else spends the lives.
That said I do not get the sense Russia is even trying to win on the battlefield at this point, just keep the question open by spending obsolete materiel and population fractions that could become a threat if the regime is weakened: national minorities, but also just surplus young men in general.
And that the real play is the “gas weapon”, cutting energy to European NATO, weakening their economies and generally making life unpleasant in ways that raises the Tension Meter and enables future induced or organic disruption, with the ultimate goal of chipping countries from the alliance or at least leaving them less productive contributors to it and object lessons going forward.
They’ve already substantially split the Visegr\u00e1d Group \u2013 which as a bloc having strained the EU might actually leave the Western alliance structure in a stronger position \u2013 by differentially relating to their historical memory \u2013 and to the still-the-same geostrategic positions that history arose from. Poland still understands “expansion from the east” as chief existential threat but has no such sense regarding Western alliances that recognize Poland as Poland.
Whereas Hungary takes up the Hapsburg heritage of not-Russia but also not-Germany (as it might plausibly understand east-towards-Ukraine force projection), thinking of itself as the natural leader of East Europe (if not pre-Trianon possessor \u2013 recall it still reminisces about parts of Ukraine’s land and population as truly Hungarian) in this role.
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