Some of the comments on this thread defy belief.
For the record: my wife is Russian. She comes from a town called Nishny Novgorod. In the Soviet Union, it was known as Gorky. They built most of their aircraft there back in the day.
I've been to Russia many times. It is my home away from home. It is a beautiful, forbidding, gigantic nation. Its people are a wonderful, salt of the earth, inquisitive type with more intelligence in most cases than they know what to do with.
Tampee may be a sick, demented, perverted individual, but he does have a point: nobody, and I mean NOBODY, has ever beaten Russia on their home turf.
It is the only nation on this planet that can state that claim. (Yes, the United States has lost on its own soil. The war of 1812.)
People talk a lot of smack about Russia. Oddly, the Russians don't talk a lot of smack about us. They simply ask, "What's up with you Americans? Why are you such assholes? Why do you hate everybody?"
I have to tell them the truth: "Because we're ignorant, uneducated and we're such failures in life for the most part that we have to be hateful to others so that we feel better about ourselves."
That is always my response. Their response to that is always the same. A nod, a pat on the back, and free drinks on them. Then we talk about sports, cars, gardening, music, art and school.
Anybody that thinks the United States can just walk in and push Russia around is in for a very, very rude awakening. Should it ever come down to that, it's not going to be Americans outraged about 5,000 dead troops like we've seen since 9/11.
It will be hundreds of thousands. We will lose carriers, tanks, tons of aircraft, all of it. And even if we do manage to gain a foothold on Russian soil, it wont last. Russia has everything they need to fight forever. And they have one thing we don't: The Russian Winter that no army at any time in all of human history has ever overcome.
It would be a disaster of epic proportion for the U.S.