I'm kind of lost in my understanding when it comes to Europe. To me it is very illustrative how the Wirecard guy (son of a KGB agent and is currently residing in Russia) while having access to key intelligence information of Germany - by virtue of for example informants and other intelligence services payments going through Wirecard - at the same time was openly having "safaris" with the Wagner group in Syria.

I like how people always forget to mention that the reason as to why the plane getting shot down never resulted in an "escalation" is that Putin immediately bombed Turkish troops and killed like 30 people, at which point they both basically agreed to sweep it under the rug.

A few additional points of context to consider:

- The "Turkey taught Putin" narrative is kind of BS. The leader of Turkey imprisoned the pilot who shot down the Russian jet, essentially saying he acted on his own. Afterwards, Turkey bought Russian military equipment. This reaction is the opposite of sovereignty.

- Speculation: Russia is looking to provoke Europe into responding. The thinking is to get Europe to focus on their own air defense, over assisting Ukraine. This is why the general, and correct, response in Europe is to keep calm and keep sending air defense equipment to Ukraine instead of freaking out. There of course are some lines where it is not possible to shrug it off, like recently in Poland, where the situation was so unsafe that we had to react with weapons. The most important element of Europe's security is that the Ukraine war does not end in a victory for Russia.

Edit: Formatting

Why are TL;DR's always at the end of a piece?