Ukraine is not known for strong martial prowess or military technological sophistication 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, 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.
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.
