Man, in case you haven’t noticed, the topic we were talking about was demographics
It was simply to say that Russian demographics are especially with the deaths of many young individuals and youth drain catastrophic, and that won’t change even with conquest of Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus.
I mentioned that Russia could theoretically go on taking Caucasus and Central Asia (with severe backlash even from China and India possibly), which would help demographics a bit but would bring quite a lot of different kind of issues. You don’t want to be a minority in your own “nation-state”. And in that context, going for conquest of NATO countries for the sake of bettering demographics is also out of question, for many reasons, one being their shitty demographics as well, another reason being that with what we see in Ukraine, even without going nuclear, they’d certainly lose. I was speaking theoretically, not insinuating they would wanna invade NATO.
But now that we are at it, while I do get your point, it has to be pinpointed that NATO isn’t “taking over” of the countries, the countries are joining themselves because of fear from Russian expansionism and interventionism. What other choice would the Baltic states have? Get annexed like in 1940 and then get finally Russified? (I’m not saying there isn’t the expansion of US influence in that, ofc it is, but I believe the context has to be mentioned as well)
You don’t see military bases around US, bcs neither China, nor Russia could have managed to convince Canada or Mexico to station their troops there. I wouldn’t rly try to see that as it’s bcs one is good and one is bad, they simply have different cards to play with. Skill issue.