It would have been perfectly reasonable for Russia to consider such spy missions as active and vital elements of the Ukrainian kill chain and part of ongoing active attacks, which would give them all the legal cover they need to shoot them down under UN self defence rules. But all those legal arguments means nothing when you don’t have the hard power to fight the US in a conventional war and win.
Not shooting such spy planes down is not surprising, what is surprising is that the Russians are just letting them do their spying so blatantly without any interference or pushback.
China has been dropping chaff and flares directly in the face of Australian and Canadian spy planes and those were not actively taking part in attacks aimed at killing Chinese soldiers. The Russians are not even scrambling fighters to escort these NATO spy planes. That’s the unforgivable part.
Why are the Russians not sending fighters to do barrel rolls over these spy planes? At a minimum fly in close formation and physically block their spying with your fighters’ airframes. That’s all perfectly legal and frankly expected behaviour. Making such spying so easy for NATO is hard to understand and frankly ridiculous.
The calculus is probably that as long as Russia has battlefield and economic war success, the cost of NATO using Ukraine to fight their war is worth it.
While Russia cannot beat US offensively in a land war, it'd be erroneous to believe US would face anything but a lengthy and very bloody stalemate, one that could tip should Russia recieve massive military support or even the arrival of a volunteer army.
If Russia decides to start war against NATO, it would wait for China to also join, that way they have an actual decent chance of taking ground. The moment open war starts between NATO and Russia, China will also attack NATO to defend Russia. Therefore, the attack will only come when its clear that US expansionism cannot be stopped with economic or political means, only by force.
