Europe

oh, i forgot the tankie part. China's recent quantization of deepseek v4 has basically made it impossible to monetize a token. they definitely have like, dozens of backdoors established in these AI companies as well as really good methods to manually scrape their weights just from clever interaction, and also just plain good scrappy techniques for utilizing old GPUs and RAM. the result? say you're a rich idiot who wants access to powerful AI. you can just run a free Chinese model on your own computer, or, if you're rich enough, your own data-center! and the AI companies get none of your money. China is undermining a critical revenue stream for AI and I'm pretty happy about it

The "problem" is that Russia is not going attack NATO in that classical sense. Obviously they'd be completely fucked if they did.

What they instead do is keep microescalating, like the schoolyard bully who goes to your face and says "not touching".

They said that Nazi Germany had no reserve to fight WW2? Who said that?

NATO losing is not necessary Russia winning. Vietnam did not really defeat NATO in conventional sense. Afghanistan neither did defeat NATO nor USSR. Algeria successfully resisted against France. Ethiopia pushed back Italians in their first war. The weaker countries did not occupy the stronger ones nor destroy their military. Hovewer these conflicts impacted deeply the stronger countries, and not for the best and they are still considered losers by history. Also Russia is way stronger proportionally than those previous examples and in same way to defeat NATO they would not necessary need to obliterate their military or even occupy much territory. Actually it can also work the opposite way, NATO itself could win in a similar way, but war politics as always are unpredicted, aside from death and destruction of course.

So, let's speculate on a full scale conflict if it goes to that. First, the most obvious: nukes. You will kill millions at minimum (in practice mostly civilians) Russians. Same will happen to westeners, the devastation would be massive if not apocalyptic.

But let's imagine nukes do not exist or are not used. What makes you so sure a large bombing campaign would make Russia surrender (they historically sustained having cities destroyed to dust and rebuilt them later) or an advance deep into Russian territory would be successful? What if military demands are not accepted, what if the population and government resists. What if men from central and western Europe massively dodge draft? I would avoid going to die thousands of kilometers away personally, would you? What if USA/Canada/Australia, other NATO countries... abstain from conflict? What if Russia also launches a massive bombing campaign and Europeans pressure their governments to sue for peace rather than hiding underground counting their dead and without electricity? It can go either way, you can never now.

Russians advancing deep into European territory is extremely unlikely, yes, but what makes you think the advance into Russia would be so different? Would you call a "frozen for years" conventional conflict with enormous economic damages, poverty and hundreds of thousands or millions of your fellow countrymen dying there, a win?

Then imagine all goes perfectly, you push all the way to the Siberia or whatever (no one in history has accomplished this before), you bomb the factories (and inevitably schools and hospitals). Guerilla warfare will be present, that will be a black hole for military personell and finances. Russia has way more territory and population than Vietnam or Afganistan. Russians, even liberally minded ones will rightfully mostly see westerners as occupiers. And all for what? So you can leave a failed state there later.

Maybe my response was not wholly coherent (English not my first language) and is too long, however my point is than especially in 21 century soft economical and cultural power is what makes your country or alliance strong and prosperous, it is how true geopolitical victory is archieved.

Poland? Not russia