| >Is anyone at all worried about Russia retaliating directly against America for all this success? No. Direct retaliation would mean the end of the Putin regime. Total financial aid to Ukraine from the US over the last 21 months has amounted to $77 billion so far. About $30 billion or so more has been appropriated but has not been spent yet. That is a lot of money, but the amount spent so far is only ~0.3% of the US's GDP and ~5.4% of its annual Federal Budget-- spread out over nearly 2 years. With that, and contributions from other allies roughly doubling that total, Ukraine has fought Russia to a standstill and is very slowly gaining ground. Any direct conventional retaliation against the United States would bring to bear a much, much, larger percentage of its resources and very likely result in the complete annihilation of any involved forces. Russian forces are very poorly equipped, trained, and led which means there have been single weeks (particularly the last several weeks) in the War in Ukraine where more Russian losses occurred than occurred in total over 20 years of US involvement in the Global War on Terror. So that leaves a nuclear response. A nuclear response would end in the annihilation of Russia itself. The Putin regime seems very interested in self-preservation. That leaves indirect proxy responses. Historically, proxy wars against the United States have not ended well for either the proxy or the supporter of the proxy. Even proxies who "win" are often damaged to the point of ruin, taking decades to recover. |
If anything, some of these will end up saving the U.S. money because maintenance and eventual disposal would have been far more expensive than shipping it to Ukraine.