Because money spent in an efficient and effective system has more power than money spent in an ineffective and bloated system. One example - Germany doesn't actually have enough helicopters operational to meet their needs, so they used civilian contractor helicopters in Afghanistan.
The structures are just so different that it's hard to make good comparisons. Germany can't keep its troops and equipment equipped or repaired _at home_, while Russian is capable of doing so thousands of miles from beyond its borders.
The German military in particular is "neither structurally capable nor equipped" to meet its defense obligations, according to the German parliamentary commissionor for the armed forces. Their helicopter readiness is something like 15%, they don't have the funding to keep their navy seaworthy, for most of 2018-20 they only had enough operational armaments to keep 4 of their eurofighter jets armed. They don't have enough body armor for all their troops, so they rotate it out to whichever battalion is active. Current bundeswehr projections are that they'll be able to equip all their troops in 2031.
It's gotten so bad that the German 2019 readiness report was kept secret, after the 2018 report was so bad.
Long story short, the German military is fundamentally incapable of meeting its basic defensive goals (defending the home territory of the nation), while Russia is a near peer competitor with the United States, and is capable of offensive force projection thousands of miles from it's home territory
Links for the quotes and numbers.
https://dsm.forecastinternational.com/wordpress/2019/01/31/g...
https://sofrep.com/amp/specialoperations/germanys-military-r...
https://www.strifeblog.org/2020/07/03/the-german-military-mu...
Russia is as unpredictable as they ever were at the moment and there is a fair chance of this leading to some kind of escalation in the near future.
Will try to return post-soviet countries back to «USSR 2.0».
Will capture Belarus somewhat.
Will station army across Ukrainian border.
Will try to circumvent Kyiv, while distracting Ukrainian army at the South.
1. Hostile military block on the borders (expansion of NATO or any moves that may be treated as towards the expansion or challenging the status quo, as in Ukraine with Crimea).
2. Status of Russian population and Russian language (Georgia in 2008, Ukraine - Donbass, Baltics - low intensity information war).
For the neighboring states they are the keys to their own security: addressing those fears of Russia by diplomatic means, those countries can bring more peace than arming themselves against the invasion.
The Russian Empire was known as «Jail of Nations», because they captured so many different nations across a huge area. To consolidate them, they are erasing their identity by forcing all of them to speak a single invented language, called Russian, which is based on Old Slavonic Church language, which is based on South Slavonic dialect as spoken near to Salonika (Greece) a thousand years ago. This is somewhat different from behavior of some other empires (Spanish Empire, Great Britain Empire, etc.), because the language was invented, so it was not native language for anyone, so nobody had an upper leg and nobody can be clearly blamed as invader.
Those, who switched to the new language, invented reasons about why Gorgeous and Mighty Russian language is superior to their laughable and weak native languages, so they have strong beliefs that they need to help those minor nations to escape the hell of speaking them and join the Great Russian Civilization.
Russia(now Ukraine) used Russian (now Ukrainian) language, which was a modernized version of Old Slavonic language, so they refused to accept archaic language. In 1912(?) Folk Assembly of All Russia (now Ukraine) declared rename of Russia (now Ukraine) to Ukraine to avoid confusion with Russian Empire or its language. (It's well hidden fact). Ten years after that, Great Ukrainization started, so millions of Russians (now Ukrainians) switched to Ukrainians, then Great Ukrainization aborted by Russians. 20 millions of Ukrainians were recorded as Russians again, 7 million adults (and 23 million children) were murdered by starvation in Holodomor.
Russian language, Russian culture, etc. are very new. For example, there are 0 (zero) folk songs in Russian language. Russians are studying history of Russia (now Ukraine) instead of history of their own nations. This makes them wonder why Russia now called Ukraine, and why their motherland is captured by Ukrainians. This makes them mad about Ukraine and Ukrainians. Nobody tells them real history, of course.
Based on what we know from the history, yes, USA could do it, as they did in the Bay of Pigs. In fact, USA invaded with military forces in Latin America so many times that by now they should have lost any credibility in democratic world.
I don't think it is possible to keep such secret from Russia for 30 years. Ukrainian president deflected to Russia in 2014, and that means that any secret that he might've known is available to Russia.
They will not. They gave up Crimea almost without fight. Many people at Ukraine are russian speaking and many of them don't mind becoming a part of Russia, just like Criemea people. Just compare with Chechen war in 90's.
Baltic countries are better connected to Russia and Belarus via rail, road, electricity grid, etc than to the rest of the EU.
EU was reluctant to fund infrastructure projects to change that, e.g. the railway from Poland through all the three Baltic capitals
EU grants Baltic grids 720 mln euros to unplug from Russia
And the main point stands. Baltic countries were part of USSR for 46 years from 1945 until 1991. EU had 30 years to fix the problem but it did not.