There is one reason and one reason only that Russia poses any kind of threat to the U.S. and NATO. Nukes.
That's it.
There will never be a conventional ground war between the U.S. and Russia because the U.S. doesn't want one and Russia knows it couldn't even compete in one.
Russia tried picking on their little brother and is losing because the U.S. gave Ukraine HIMARS and Javelin Missiles. That along with the bravery and dedication of massively outnumbers Ukrainian soldiers is all it took to stop big bad Russia.
Russia is playing the **** Around And Find Out game, and they're finding out.
Well there's one other factor that I think it s little bit underrated. There's a significant advantage to valuing the lives of your own people at essentially zero.
A place like Poland or Germany couldn't lose 100,000 people in a war and have it be politically irrelevant. There would be significant pressure to make significant gains proving the war could end soon or to simply end the war entirely.
Russia has a multi-century history of treating troops as totally expendable, and you're seeing that play out again here. There is simply no comparable cost to Putin to sacrificing a quarter million young people, and that means there's a social tolerance for the pain of war that can be leveraged to Russian advantage.