In 3-5 years if Russia takes over Ukraine, the Russian army + Ukraine army could be 2.2 million standing army and battle hardened. At that point I don't expect Russia to attack a NATO country right away, for one thing it will take some time to integrate the Ukraine army.
Sorry, but I still don't get why Russia would be able or even decide to integrate the Ukrainian army into its own? Seems much more logical to me that, were large amounts, or even the entirety of Ukraine conquered by Russia, the Ukrainian army would simply move into guerilla warfare, very likely utilizing bases in NATO countries to have a safe "homeground" to launch attacks in their occupied homeland as well.
Also the situation is evolving in the EU with Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Its hard to say where things will be with those countries say 5 years from now. The Russian will adapt their strategy based on what is going on.
Not much more is happening than the politicians here being a bit more vocal about wanting to roll back the sanctions on Russia and restarting doing business with them. That's not something unique to those countries, I've never seen anyone deny that a lot of politicians and businessmen in Europe think that the sanctions are doing more harm than good, or that a lot of countries in Europe will be happy to restart relations with Russia once the war is over. Our countries will be the first and most enthusiastic ones, but I highly doubt they'll be the only ones.
Also Russia can put pressure in places and see what the West does. Like how the West kept letting Hitler take over places until they drew a final line at Poland. Yet another factor is who is in power in the West and what the West wants to do. Russia can test them to see how far they are willing to go.
I mean, they already did that and now we are in the situation that we are in
.
And if Russia gets stronger it will gain more allies/support.
Winning a war doesn't necessarily mean getting stronger. If they do indeed overrun the entirety of Ukraine and manage to deal with guerillas and so on, as you expect, that might apply, but even then, if they lose too many soldiers, or tanks, vehicles and so on, and Ukraine's infrastructure, modern factories and so on get damaged too much, they could very well be objectively weaker than before the war.
And countries going neutral. Like it wouldn't surprise me if Finland decides to go back to being neutral. For Finland why risk getting ran over by Russia, if the Russians will accept Finish neutrality.
Why would they flip-flop like that
? They were doing their best to be neutral for decades, only for the war to convince them that a NATO membership is the only way unlessyou want to risk being attacked. Russia's belligerence is
the reason why they aren't neutral, why would it somehow lead to their neutrality?
Thats another option for Russia, I know many in Russia want Kazakhstan back.
Why would they invade it though? They already intervened there once and then just left. As of now, it's one of their closest allies, why would they turn an allied country into a conflict hotspot?
China would rather Russia control those countries than having Muslims on China's border.
None of their actions even indicate that they have a problem with those governments though? They've clamped down on separatists in Xinjiang, as just about any country would do against violent separatists, but they've never so much as indicated that they have a problem with the governments of those countries just because they are Muslims just like the Uyghurs? They've been expanding trade with those countries year-by-year and have worked hard to integrate those countries as a key BRI regional node. Similarly, one of the reasons why they clamped down so hard on separatism in Xinjiang was to make sure that no important BRI node would be politically unstable and to make sure that trade could flow easily from China to Central Asia, I can't imagine them having no problem with Russians invading the region and destroying it as an economic zone.
