All out war shocked the shit out of the 20 somethings in Ukraine too, many fled, and yet Russia has not made significant advances in the following three years.

There's no plausible world in which Russia has the strength to take on the rest of Europe, in, say, the next ten years.

(Let's assume nukes are out of the question)

Rest - maybe not. But russia currently holds territory about the size of the 3 baltic states. And Ukraine before 2022 had about 10 times larger army than those 3 countries combined.

Not conventionally, but they still can cause a nuisance with long range weapons and even few nukes out of thousands they advertise might still be accidentally operational.

> There's no plausible world in which Russia has the strength to take on the rest of Europe, in, say, the next ten years.

Sure they do. Total war + support from norks and China will do it.

Something the fresh european patriots overlook is that the parts of Ukraine Putin managed to hold on to overlap very closely with the areas most hostile to the rehabilitation of Ukrainian nationalism/most positive to Russia (at least to some largely imaginary Russia which defeated the Nazis but wasn't really communist, i.e. Putin's Russia).

If it's that costly to hold onto areas where most people actually like Putin relatively speaking, how much more expensive wouldn't it be to hold onto areas to where people hate him?