Poland's energy grid was targeted by never-before-seen wiper malware

> for some reason announced in 2008 plans to expand to Georgia and Ukraine

This was a G. W. Bush idea, during his last year in office, and it was never going to actually happen.

At the dinner on Wednesday, the German and French position was supported by Italy, Hungary and the Benelux countries, a senior German official said. Mr. Bush was said to have accepted that his position was not going to prevail,

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/world/europe/03nato.html

> Was the EU and the USA friendly towards Russia ...

When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, did Angela Merkel stop the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, as very sensibly demanded by much of Eastern Europe? No, of course not - if we just trade more with Russia, they will be interested in peace! Germany deservedly lost billions finishing the construction, and it never transmitted a single ccm of gas.

> You know the result of that, but still consider there was no provocation at all

I think a better question to ask is, why do countries that border on Russia try so hard to become NATO members?

Time matters.

Imagine the power grid fails in an entire city for 48 hours. How many apartments or shops have backup power for 48 hours? What about hospitals or cellphone towers or traffic lights?

How long before someone cannot make a 911 call or hits another car at night or dies in intensive care because the machines don’t work anymore? What about all the food in a refrigerator, or CCTV cameras, or POS payments or a thousand other things? And if sometimes physically fails, how long before a technician (who was himself relying on that power grid) is able to reach the place, carrying whatever spare part they have, and fix the thing?

Or, take a dam. I’m no dam expert, but how long does it take before a flood happens? And when water starts flooding the streets, how long before people can’t get out of their homes, cars are swept away, and so on? How long before standing water starts carrying diseases?

The reason everyone used carpet bombing in WW2 was the inability to aim competently. This even persisted after WW2, leading to some tests of air-to-air nuclear weapons just to give the missiles a decent chance to actually disable the target they were fired at.

The counter-strategies that the British used to defend against German strikes included "switch off all the lights at night so they don't know where they are" and "order newspapers to lie about which part of the city was damaged in order that spies reading British newspapers and reporting back to HQ said missiles fell short/went too far, causing HQ to incorrectly compensate on the next strike". I don't know if the reverse was true, despite now living in Berlin.

Everyone's supply chains were also much shallower, and equipment much cruder and therefore easier to make (though also less efficient). Half of London or Berlin losing electricity makes a much smaller difference when far less was electrified in the first place, e.g. loss of electricity for a heat pump doesn't matter so much when the terraces and apartment blocks have internal fireplaces and regular coal deliveries.

Also re Vietnam, it took until 1997 to return to the per-person energy use it had in 1970: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/vietnam

And until 1993 to reach the not-adjusted-for-population level.

And the electricity graphs don't even go back far enough to see what that war was like, that's all energy.

The name of that is proxy war. They would attack each other directly only if they were prepared to escalate to open war, but when we’re talking about nuclear powers, luckily the chance of that happening seems to be very low. It’s the only reason Europe does not openly deploy troops to Ukraine, though there are definitely some under cover.

> it was never going to actually happen.

That announcement is still on NATOs website to this day. To think it would never happen can only be seen as wishful thinking.

> try so hard to become NATO members?

If your intention is to align with the EU, it makes sense you want military protection against invasion in the future. Even Russia wanted at one point to join. The question is really why Russia should sit quietly while several countries around it join an alliance against it? Would the US be ok with Mexico and Canada doing that? Sounded ridiculous until a few months ago, now that is a sensible thing for them to seek. Look at how the US reacted to just a EV deal Canada made with China.