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I find your framing a bit odd.
I mean, perhaps that was how Russia framed it at home (I trust neither set of sources on this), but it is certainly true that NATO/America has been losing the war as we defined it as well. Putin was a big bad that had to, and would be, soundly defeated by the power of freedom and money. The latter idea, has failed. We are spending many multiples of what Russia is spending to gradually lose terrain.
I suppose this deal is not so bad if you are a Brit or Canadian who cares nothing about Ukrainian deaths. But if you think NATO prestige is important, its a huge loss. Being a NATO proxy is a provably bad deal now. Even with American investment. Heck, the rest of NATO might as well be dead to the remaining civilized world. Minus America, NATO couldn't help anyone anywhere.
NATO is certainly much weaker now than 2020, but not than 2022. We cratered as a legitimate organization under Biden and it is likely impossible to get lower than Russia just invading again after abstaining for 4 years. But its certainly possible. Trump could keep doing the same things but more. And then our support would get discredited even more.
Why? I genuinely know very little about NATO so this question is sincere. Why would Finland and Sweden join if NATO is dead? Why would Ukraine losing discredit NATO when it wasn't even a member? It got a shitload of money just for being a proxy, presumably we would do much more for a legit member. Money can't guarantee victory but money is useful and people want money, why would that prospect not retain its attractiveness? If I offer to give any student at my local high school free SAT tutoring and a student I tutor gets a very low score does that completely discredit me and prove my tutoring was worthless? Not at all, at the end of the day he has to take the test and I can only do so much. The tutoring could remain an extraordinarily good deal for anyone willing to take it.
Well, on the other hand Georgia (erstwhile NATO candidate) just reelected an anti-Western party, and Erdogan is flirting with BRICS. It may be fair to say that the war galvanised the cultural West, so Sweden and Finland (which realistically had nothing to fear from Russia either way) joined as a symbolic gesture of support; but as far as the idea that siding with NATO will make your life materially better (as opposed to any spiritual satisfaction you may derive if you sympathise with its cause) goes, we have at least weak evidence (and justification) that fence-sitters became more skeptical.
Completely untrue in case of Finland and almost certainly Sweden as well.
On what basis do you figure? There is little use arguing about counterfactuals, but I would have taken a bet against Russia attacking either Finland or Sweden conditional on them not joining NATO at very high odds. I never saw an argument for why they would do so that was not based on some form of "because it would be the evil-maxxing thing to do", or ascribing territorial expansion to them as a motive (which also doesn't really seem to mesh with reality, and is instead fielded as part of a rhetorical trick to deny their stated reasons for attacking UA).
Since Finland and Sweden hold important strategic locations in the Baltic/Arctic area (northern Finnish Lapland and Ã…land in case of Finland, Gotland in case of Sweden) that Russia might wish to control in the event of a wider NATO/Russia conflict.
Even if we assume that Russia would actually engage in a direct conventional war against NATO (which continues seeming very far-fetched to me), and somehow could magically summon the manpower and materiel for such an undertaking, I don't see what benefits it would gain from expending its resources (which would presumably still be finite, even if we assume for the sake of argument they are ~10x what they have now) on such an undertaking. The Ukraine war clearly shows that naval area denial currently has the upper hand in a near-peer conflict, so all major surface combatants would be disabled or pinned in port within a few weeks of the beginning of such a war; and with anti-ship missiles taking some one-digit number of minutes to strike a target, an Incheon-style landing around Warsaw would be as unrealistic to stage from Ã…land as it would be to stage from Kronstadt (or more so, since it would be harder to get an air defense umbrella even over the staging area).
The obvious strategy for Russia to pursue if it for some reason decided to fight a conventional do-or-die war against NATO on the offensive would be to seize the Baltics and then try to ram through the Suwałki gap as in Cold War planning scenarios. They didn't attack Sweden in WWII either, when it still would have made more sense (as naval action had not yet been rendered quite as impossible by modern reconnaissance and targeting) and they had a bigger and better army; and even their action against Finland was decidedly half-hearted, seemingly only serving to loosen the Finnish chokehold on Leningrad's northern supply lines that gave them trouble during the first half of the war. (As much as it may be flattering to you, it seems implausible that they would have been unable to make it past Vainikkala after fighting their way through to Berlin, if they actually were equally motivated.)
It seems pretty clear to me that the Ã…land/Gotland explanation was advanced by politicians who had personal incentives to make your respective countries join NATO, and lapped up by a media and population eager to see themselves personally involved on the right side in a conflict that they perceived as just (much like in religious apocalyptic fiction in the vein of Left Behind, the devil always takes very specific personal interest in the author's/reader's country and people).
You've mixed up two gaps.
The Suwałki gap is a post-Cold War thing. When the USSR existed, Lithuania was a constituent part of it. And theoretical NATO-fighting Russia would have to secure it before seizing the rest of the Baltics, to prevent Poland from counterattacking.
The Fulda gap was the one from the Cold War, but it's in the middle of Germany right now. It was considered the only suitable place for a large mechanized offensive against NATO.
Blech, I was half asleep when writing that post. I did indeed mean the Polish gap as the one they would ram through, but you are totally right about the Cold War one.
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