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Notes -
Pre-war, I assumed this would be true because of the EXTREMELY mediocre showing of Ukraine during the Russian invasion of Crimea. But (pretty obviously) the Ukrainians did a lot of work between then and the second Russian invasion.
And if you set aside the question of Ukrainian morale, I don't think they are an embarrassingly easy target at all, on paper. They had a very large inherited ground army, and a large population pool. They're more on the level of Poland, not a softer target (say) Estonia or Latvia or even a medium-hard target like Finland. It's true from what I can tell that their weapon modernization was fairly meh and that their air force in particular was probably lackluster (but see also Poland, which is still flying Su-17s!) but the fundamentals (lots of tanks, artillery, warm bodies) go a long way with proper morale. I think that, e.g. non-US NATO would have struggled to invade Ukraine the same way Russia did.
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