If this was coming from a non bias point of view it would be different but whatever…
The Institute for the Study of War's Fredrick W. Kagan wrote that unless the US resumes sending military aid, Ukraine will be defeated and Russia will become an even greater military threat able to then "drive toward the NATO borders from the Black Sea to central Poland."
In the event that Russia attacked the alliance, NATO would likely have to resolve threats at Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Hungary's southern borders, holding up its forces that are tasked with defending countries in the Baltic region like Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
In that dire scenario, "NATO troops, inexperienced in fighting modern mechanized war, would be staring down a battle-hardened Russian military, emboldened from its victory in Ukraine," Kagan wrote.
He said that it "is almost impossible to overstate how much the success or failure of Ukraine's current efforts to fight off the Russian attack changes the prospects of a future Russian attack against NATO's northeastern flank," which would be front-line fighting in a war with Russia.
"An independent Ukraine with a strong military and a pro-Western government will make a Russian attack on NATO much more difficult, risky, and costly for Moscow," he wrote.
Kagan argued in his analysis that a "victorious Russia that succeeds in its aim of destroying Ukraine entirely" will likely "pose a major conventional military threat to NATO in a relatively short period of time."
He added that "it will be much harder to deter future Russian aggression and both more difficult and far more costly to defeat it if deterrence fails."