I'm not sure who are the not-so-smart ones in Europe atm. Consider Germany buying gas off India at 5x the usual price, which India got from Russia. Very smart. /s
Mass uprisings are probably near. It will become awfully clear which Kaisers are actually naked. Hint: It's not gonna be Putin.
But the thing that nobody can hide behind the propaganda is the fact that the war is still ongoing. Relative to projections before the invasion began, the fact that there is still war in progress is itself, alone, a glaring and unmaskable indicator that this did not go according to plan.
Do you know that in Italy already a right-wing party just got elected into government?
Do you have any idea about rising sympathy for the right-wing AfD in Germany?
Do you have any idea about rising energy prices and how they are about to mass destroy businesses? How people are beginning to struggle paying for their energy bills?
This oblivious attitude to what's going on is exactly going to be the reason for the downfall of the EU.
Why do I never see these types of people address the facts and numbers? All I see is mockery and complete oblivion to reality.
Probably the same thing the US did in Afghanistan up until the moment they suddenly had to gtfo.
Just took a long time to get a leader with the guts to do the needful and admit the country couldn't be remote-controlled.
National pride is a hell of a thing. Blinds people to reason.
Sounds good on paper except that it's a complete and absolute pipe dream in reality. Even without the war that transition would've taken at least half a decade if not a decade. Believing that this can now somehow be magically achieved even faster than originally planned despite what's going on is basically the definition of wishful thinking.
Also, I have no idea how you live, but I wouldn't be surprised if you have but yourself to feed, live in a small apartment and happen to be among the few with a good income. That's unfortunately not very representative of your average family household.
As for myself, I have a quite large family, and of course as all human beings we have worries about the future, but nothing really serious happened to us, and our lives are more or less as before. My electricity bill rose by 30% but it's still ridiculously small. I see no any signs of Europe falling despite of what Russian media are actively trying to tell their viewers. Maybe it's to stop emigration, but the ones likely to migrate (=young & talented) know better already. Many of them are staying only because they don't want to leave their older parents.
But I don't get how you can brush off fuel prices that have almost doubled since 2 years ago, almost double the butter and egg prices, rocketing energy prices, to just name a few examples as "ridiculously small" and "nothing really serious" when a good chunk of the populations live more or less hand-to-mouth and can barely afford such a drastic and sudden increase of living costs?
This to me is simply willful oblivion, and it's sad to see how people never learn from the past.
I don't think I'm particularly well off. I rent my apartment and I don't even have a car. I regularly meet with the members of my family living in different places and the amount of complaining hasn't increased considerably. There are more Ukrainians everywhere mostly women with kids, but they're nice people and many of them are working wherever they can, it's very good for our economy.
Take electricity prices in Germany: Used to be around 20-30ct/kwH, now beyond 50ct/kwH.
I mean just look at inflation this year, a staggering 8% and beyond - a new high since many decades. https://www.laenderdaten.info/Europa/Deutschland/inflationsr...
And all of this is only just the beginning.
I'm seriously wondering which data you are looking at?
This whole warfare is for resources (oil and gas). Both the US and Russia have investments in the black sea but Burisma and co (With US investments) are strangling the Russian energy companies slowly.
NATO/NAZis/Democracy/Freedom/Freeing DPR etc are all excuses by Russia and West while the primary reason is gas and oil
US has been rabidly pushing EU to cut off all Russian energy for years and years.
Modern wars are fought with blood, money, and message. Putin picked a fight with an opponent that is beating him on 1 and killing him on 3, and the international community is stepping up to provide 2 (partially because of how good Zelenskyy and his team have done on 3).