After months of building up troops on the Ukrainian borders, Russians are facing more opposition than they expected. While White House officials are warning an invasion could come at any time, the resistance against Russia is growing, meaning Vladimir Putin is going to have to make a difficult decision.

In addition to trying to convince the Western world that it should control Ukraine and Belarus, the Russians are also after every country of the former Soviet space that broke away back in 1989 to 1992. That includes Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania, as well as the constituent states of the former Yugoslavia (Slovenia, Croatia, Albania).

Needless to say, everyone in all of those countries has told the Russians to, um, shove it, and the Russians are now publicly pouting because no one’s taking them seriously.

In fact, the Russians have been a bit hamfisted with a lot of their effort here. From a military point of view, the Ukrainians have been able to capitalize on everyone feeling kind of sorry for them and have been able to absorb huge amounts of military material from a number of Western countries. So the Americans and the Baltics have famously sent in javelin anti tank missiles and stinger anti-aircraft missiles.

The French had been providing a lot of air defense materials. The Turks have come in and provided a lot of drones, which we’ve seen in the Azerbaijani-Armenian conflict of last year worked to great effect against Russian equipment. And the Brits are basically taking everything they possibly have that is in their spare warehouses and sending it direct.

Even the Germans who have been desperately trying to stay out of this have sent a few thousand troops up to the Baltics as part of NATO reconnaissance and NATO confidence building.

Countries that are not part of NATO – Sweden and Finland – are also supporting Ukraine by providing military equipment.

The military balance is still strongly in the Russians’ favor, but it’s not nearly as lopsided as it used to be. And any Russian move strategically into Ukraine now would come at a much, much higher price.

At this point, the biggest achievement for Russia since this all started is that personalities on the American right like Fox’s Tucker Carlson are saturating the airwaves with talking points written by the Kremlin.

Aside from that one specific game, this is not going well for the Russians. And at some point this is gonna go one of two ways. The Russians are gonna move and pay the price for the war, which will be high. Or the Russians are gonna have to figure some way to climb down. And in a political authority where really there’s just a handful of men at the top who are making all of the decisions, that is the kind of thing that now might actually threaten the regime of Vladimir Putin.