RE: Britain shuts out China 5G
Here is the problem Putin faces. Russia has no easily defensible borders, and demographics will force a reduction in size of his army within the decade.
The Great European Plain runs from the Rhine and the Ardennes in the west to the Urals in the east, with very few breaks. It is occupied primarily by three countries whose fortunes have been shaped differently by the lack of a natural defensive barrier.
Germany had powerful France to the west and the plain to the east, so it had to become a warlike major military power to survive. They simply had to do everything better than anyone else, so they did. The problem is that when Germany is doing everything better than anybody else, they are a threat to everybody.
Russia's western defense has always been that it is such an inhospitable place for a foreign army in winter that nobody has been able to invade and succeed--not Napoleon, not Hitler. The historic scare for the Russians has been the Mongol hordes from the east, and that was a major factor in the breakup of the USSR. Slavic Russians weren't having kids as fast as Asian Kazakhs and Turkmenis and Uzbekis and the like, so Russians were going to become a minority in their own country, and even sooner a minority in the Red Army. And as someone once said about Gorshkov, he was a pragmatist first, a Russian second, and a Communist third. What Russia had in the Iron Curtain days was a defensible western border--anchored in the Carpathain Alps in Romania to the south, with only a fairly narrow European Plain carridor before hitting the Baltic. Now that border is much longer, with almost nothing to stop potential invaders. And that low Slavic birth rate no longer makes Russians a minority in their own army, but it is shrinking the number of people of age to serve in that army, and that limits Putin's hand. If he is going to do anything, he needs to do it by 2030.
Poland and the Poles have pretty much always been there, between Russia and Germany, for centuries, but in different places at different times. If you can find one of those interactive historic maps of Poland, it has been there most of the time, but not in the same place. When modern-day Gdansk was Danzig between the wars, it was supermajority German. Now it is supermajority Polish. The Germans left, and the Poles moved back. That's pretty much what it has meant to be Polish for centuries.
Letting Poland, the Baltics, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria into NATO really spooked the Russians. Those formerly defensible borders are now part of NATO. It has only Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus for buffers. I'm not sure what Putin can actually do. I think it would be good for us to explore our options there.
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