Here’s some fun with the CIA World Factbook, courtesy of Gemini, not fact-checked by me. This might have taken me at least half an hour to an hour to pull together in the past, which means I probably wouldn’t have done it today given other things I have to get to. Anyway, I hear suggestions that Russia is going to inevitably attack western European countries. That just doesn’t make any sense. Russia is a military power only because it spends 7% of its GDP on the military, and at the moment its military is battle-hardened from recent conflict. Very roughly speaking, its military spending is on the order of double the UK, France, or Germany (any one of those). But the GDP of any one of these western European countries is on the order of double Russia’s GDP. So attack them directly, and Russia might have a short-term advantage but they will be able to overwhelm Russia over time. That’s any one. If those three countries stick together, they can steamroll Russia once they get into a war economy mode. And add in the rest of Europe or NATO not including the US, and the comparison is laughable. Add in the US, and Russia would be fighting a literally an order-of-magnitude larger enemy. So maybe, as some are suggesting, Russia would consider attacking a small NATO country like Estonia or Finland, but it seems like a huge gamble to me. And they seem to be pretty coldly rational to me. It’s seems more likely they will try to consolidate their control over the remaining non-NATO eastern European countries, and be content that they have stopped the eastward expansion of NATO dead in its tracks for the foreseeable future if not for generations. This last was probably their primary objective in attacking Ukraine, and it has been achieved.