Ukraine is not known for strong martial prowess or military technological sophistication
Besides Russia they actually have the most USSR hand me downs by far. The systems they have are in huge quantities, once upon a time earmarked for an all out ground war against NATO.
So they're about as good as you can find in Europe. Maybe not in the most advanced systems, however war has never been about the top 10% advanced systems, but about the sheer numbers of the rest 90% and how well trained/motivated your men are with those.
and yet 3 years later Russia is only barely starting to make gains inside Ukraine. Contrast that with any major NATO country (France included) with far larger budgets and far more sophisticated weaponry,
France is in isolation not much more advanced than Ukraine, and it has far less numerous IADS/afvs/artillery etc. I don't think the French army for example could hold the Donbass against the AFU.
to speak nothing of all of NATO combined including US military forces. The Russian war machine is more effective now after 3 years, but in 2022 it would easily have been smoked by either NATO minus the US, or the US by itself, but US plus the rest of NATO combined would have steamrolled the Russian military all the way back to Russian borders in short order.
Russia would dig in and it would still take months to slowly grind them back, even if its Russia alone. The issue has always been that overt NATO counterattack would not only risk nukes (which tbh would be easy to talk down Putin from), but also invoke the Korean war threshold and make China send it's own volunteers/equipment.
Say US and EU attacks Russia after 2022. Russians run back to their trenches and IADS. Suddenly, it's NATO men dying and NATO infrastructure being blown up while China just supplies weapons and specialists. A DF26 in Caucasia can destroy ships in all of the Med. Hell, you'd have oreshnik/DF attacks all over the European heartland, which Europe cannot really stop.
NATO cannot afford invoking that threshold.
The fact of the initial ineptitude of the Russian military is clearly evidenced by the fact that Putin himself was utterly clueless of how dilapidated the Russian military was in 2022 and held a delusional belief that he could lightning strike into Kiev and decapitate the current leadership and replace it with a new Russia-friendly one. Instead what the entire world witnessed was a months-long 400km-long train of logistics-impaired line of military vehicles along the roads to Kiev, getting picked off slowly by Ukrainian forces before Putin was forced to withdraw them and begin a WW1-style trench-warfare high-casualty slow-crawl across the eastern Ukrainian oblasts.
The Russian military was objectively fairly decent readiness, as far as peacetime European militaries go. Any other NATO besides US would have not been able to take ground against a decently well equipped million man force. Russia is not competing in the same weight category as US, let alone China. If you look at the industrial output, there is a maybe 5-10x lower capability for Russia vs US and up to 100x lower vs China.
Trying to judge them on the same merit is pointless, Russia does it job good enough as China's version of the Non-US NATO. There was never any plan to make Russia anything more. They can't sustain more economically.
Just by trimming the fat better, we've already gotten a Russia that does better than all the western Europeans combined at fighting. That's above expectation, since Russia has lower gdp compared to all of them together.
