Stand Up And Take A Bow Fool! Putin Just Assured His Own Worst Nightmare!

I have to state some disagreement (albeit with some nuance) to what you said near the end of your comment. A conventional war of the type Russia started can in fact be won (controlling the area/country taken over is a separate question however) with traditional arms and tactics. It does however require good, professional troops with both excellent command & control and up to date & well maintained equipment. Russia fails on every point I just mentioned. On paper they had (and continue to have) the “numbers” but their equipment isn’t up to snuff and their historic problem of a lack of rank & file disciplined & well-trained soldiers and more importantly a backbone of even a solid, much less really good corps of Non-Commissioned Officers continues. This means more than lacking good leadership of regular troops at the company and platoon level, it also means lack of crucial training for young Officers, who have always been tasked with performing duties in the Russian military that’s done by NCOs in western (and even some authoritarian armed forces) militaries in addition to providing overall leadership and ensuring proper training and performance of their units! IF willing to put up with appalling losses of troops (and more equipment than should wind up being destroyed) AND a willigness to employ methods that are at best “only” brutal but in fact are war crimes a country like Russia can get away with it. At least in places where either the world doesn’t much care or they have a solid base of civilian support. That is NOT the case with Ukraine and that’s been the flaw in Putin’s (and much of Russia’s) thinking all along. Even in the old USSR days Russian control of their country Ukrainians were okay with. They have always been as fiercely nationalistic as Russia. It’s also worth remembering that it was UKRAINIANS that moved east and created what became the Russia we know (starting roughly a thousand years ago) and not the other way around as so many Russians including Putin continue to delude themselves into believing.

Finally, when it comes to attack with helicopters and jets I’d correct you in saying they CAN be taken down with missiles including shoulder fired ones. CAN being the operative word. It takes lots of training and pilots with some serious guts but such aircraft can survive (and inflict a LOT of damage) on a modern battlefield even against SAMS and shoulder fired missiles like Stingers. Modern avionics that can confuse radar guided missiles help, as does other stealth technology and design that isn’t all that high tech. The placement and relatively simple shielding on the engines of the A-10 for example make it extremely difficult for HEAT seeking missiles to lock on, which is why despite quite a bit of use only a handful (six or seven) have sustained serious enough damage to take them out of action.

I mentioned training. Nap of the earth flying takes either really sophisticated avionics which is hugely expensive or serious and FREQUENT training (or both) which isn’t cheap either. The more you fly combat aircraft the more maintenance they need and that takes trained mechanics and parts that are worth a damn. It has become clear that just as was the case during the Cold War, Russian officers have gundecked the actual truthful reports up their chain of command on training and readiness and the results are there right now for the whole world to see.
Russian commanders including Generals up where the fighting has been going on have been skittish about using any more of their jets and helicopters than they have to precisely because they are as modern and capable of surviving against a capable enemy with good anti-air weapons, AND because those who pilot those jets and helicopters simply don’t have the endless amount of flight hours practicing high speed, low level nap-of-the-earth flying that is required. And those things (both the aircraft and the pilots) are expensive as hell and Russia simply isn’t in a position to replace them. Worse, that was the case BEFORE all this started in Ukraine! Keep in mind that Russia is a vast country geographically but not with a huge population. That’s a helluva lot of territory to defend. More importantly even though Putin is playing nice with China, Xi has got to be taking a good, hard look at things and the resource rich region of Siberia. Russia and China have only ever at best been allies of convenience but Russia’s combination paranoia combined with it’s massive inferiority complex means that a good chunk of what military resources it has will remain a long fucking way away from Ukraine precisely to keep China from deciding to take back territory that historically they feel is THEIRS.

Sorry, this got longer than I intended but my main point is that WE have proven that with the right aircraft and well-trained people flying them modern jets and helicopters can survive even on the modern battlefield.

Technically speaking, there was NO “incursion” with regard to Chechnya. Chechnya is not now, nor was it ever, a fully sovereign independent country. Its status as a “republic” (at the time of the “incursion”) was effectively the same as the “republics” in the old USSR (even Byelorussia and Ukraine, despite their seats at the UN, had no real freedom to set their own domestic, much less foreign, policies). Russia’s actions in Chechnya were done to quell a secessionist movement that would’ve led to a fully-independent Chechnya (at the very least, far more autonomy, allowing the Chechens to set their own internal affairs and withhold their men from serving in the Russian army–possibly, even joining international organizations as independent participants).

What Russia did in Georgia and in Crimea was no less than undeclared warfare on two sovereign nations with little reaction from other countries (beyond some minor recriminations) because Russia couched their invasions as “protecting” Russian citizens.

Biden a cold warrior. Give me a break. He’s not a warrior of any kind.