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If appearance of various "it would be great to conquer Poland" and/or "we deserve controlling USSR-sized sphere of influence" would appear in Russian popular and official discourse as often as "we should reconquer Moscow/Lithuania/Ukraine" appears in Polish one.
Then I will worry less.
Not invading neighbours, not having dropping nuclear device on Warsaw as part of exercise scenarios etc would be also good step.
Unambiguously being sorry for numerous Russian invasions, massacres and meddling would be nice but even previous steps are dead head dreams, so...
More or less see above. Putting propaganda billboards with "Russia has no borders", Putin's face and Russian flag in background is not some strong evidence but doing this kind of thing consistently over years has convinced me.
Maybe it is selective presentation of facts but Russia has hardly bothered to counter it.
If I would feel ever in doubt I can go to official Twitter account of Russian government and feel reassured about treating Russia as suspicious, problematic, dangerous and lying.
Given high cost of failure* and relatively small costs of reducing risks it seems to be not a paranoid overreaction to me. But well, if I would be overly paranoid then I would claim this.
Bombing Moscow under "well, they will attack anyway so we can start" would be.
*underpreparation to WW II resulted in about 16% of population murdered, multiple years of murderous occupation and decades of colonial rule. And massive devastation of economy and several other major problems. Previous such failure resulted in 123 years of occupation and required world war to undo. Even with 1% risk of things going even a bit as badly as that - spending a bit more on defence seems a good idea.
It is not paranoia if they actually after you.
(to be clear, I am not expecting Russia to run death camps, but Mariupol-style devastation is bad enough)
It is such fuckup that overestimating how specific part of fuck up is going is hardly a major failure.
This would require either absurd overstretching of Polish resources or some comical failure across Europe including Russia. Several years of grinding down USSR reserves maybe could achieve this, but that seems quite unlikely scenario. Though Russia running out of tanks while invading half-failed state next door would still not be the stupidest part of this war.
Poland does not need larger army than Russia has, it needs to have large enough to fulfil it share of ensuring that invading NATO will remain scary enough. Or alternatively, powerful enough that invading Poland will be clearly stupid idea.
Also, ideally it would be small enough that no politician will get some ideas of invading neighbours (no trace of such ideas right now, but I would not underestimate stupidity of politicians).
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