> only the US & allied governments are actually actively promoting the idea of going to war.

It's incredibly costly to park 150,000 troops and armor in a position to invade. But your issue is with the governments saying "excuse me, why does it look like you're positioning your troops for an invasion?" OK.

Don't overestimate the cost. If the units weren't there, they'd be doing large scale exercises and maneuvers, which can be even more costly. From the perspective of the Russian army, stationing a medium-sized force within their own borders is not going to be that expensive.

Also, the corresponding increase in gas prices is going to counteract that perhaps even completely.

The average US town has 6k people, so this is like relocating the population of 25 US towns to new, temporary housing.

Then you have to set up logistics to provide continual daily food and fuel to the new location for all those people. Then you have to relocate tanks which get about a mile per gallon of fuel, as well as people carriers, weapons, aircraft, missiles, ammo, field hospitals, blood and medical supplies, etc.

Armies rarely do "large scale exercises and maneuvers" precisely because they are so expensive.

Russia does multiple large scale exercises an maneuvers each year.

Russia also has a lot of basing nearby. For them, they're really only moving the units a few dozen kilometers from already established bases.

So for example, you mentioned a gallon per mile for a tank, which is indeed a realistic fuel consumption. The tanks are shipped by rail to nearby bases which is very shipped, and they then have maybe 200km to cover. 120 miles for 700 tanks is 84kGal of fuel, which is 420,000$ in fuel - that is, chump change.

Aircraft don't even need to be relocated. They're already there.

The rest, sure, but it's not as expensive as you'd think.

Looks like they decided to conduct their large scale exercises in Ukraine.

Not sure I follow why they would necessarily be doing large scale exercises and maneuvers if they weren't deployed to the Ukrainian border.

Also from what I understand a lot of these Russian troops are actually in Belarus as well.

You need to keep your troops occupied to keep readiness and to maintain training. You absolutely have to do large scale exercises and maneuvers multiple times a year. These deployments take the place of already-planned exercises, which actually were to take place in Belarus also.

You mean after the coup that placed Russia siding president in Ukraine?

The regularly-scheduled coup agreed upon by citizens, aka an election?

Elections with buses filled with Donbas miners having special voting permits that alloved them voting multiple times?

Yeah,cool ekections there, with no oversight.

Putin has:

Invaded two parts of Ukraine and waged a proxy war for years.

Attempted to destabilise, poison or assassinate opponents throughout Europe.

Positioned hundreds of thousands of troops at the Ukraine border.

Threatened nuclear war recently - he directly said they would use nuclear weapons.

Putin is the one threatening war here, though of course they are waging a disinformation campaign to try to paint the US as the aggressor.