russia doesn't have a good air force at all. they specialized in air defense because they knew they would be worthless against NATO. the S400/S500 are amazing pieces of technology that should not be dismissed
Correct assessment of their doctrine and capabilities. Carrying on from the Soviet era, they've always optimized for defense and relying on their rail network and vast terrain. Consequently they have limited expeditionary capabilities or ability to project force, as evidenced by the results in their neighboring country. The outcome of a conflict on their own turf would be a different matter, and nobody has interest in finding that out.
Their top technical strengths historically have always been radar in the pre-digital era (where they're now behind, however), SAMs, and rockets. And just massive production of cheap, simple systems. FWIW, I'd be curious to see how the S-400 actually performs in the field. Out of all their systems, it's about the only one of theirs that I think might be pretty good, effective, and numerous enough to matter.
Russian equipment tends to look amazing if you just look at the specs, but there is a lot more to a functioning system than parameters like range, speed, super-maneuvering, so many missiles, etc. Systems integration, training, crew motivation, quantity fielded, maintenance, supply chains, intelligence, ECM, etc matter just as much or more.
They also tend to hype up wunderwaffe type systems that they have trouble fielding (e.g. Su-57, T-14) or probably don't even exist or make sense (e.g. Status-6, a stealth 100 megaton nuclear cobalt-laced toperdo with some variants designed to destroy coastal cities but some other variants that have supercavitation and are designed to attack carrier groups, wtf have enough buzzwords and disparate missions?). They're the flashy "new money" showing off while the US "old money" runs the secret skunk works projects that aren't revealed until needed. So they've got some flashy stuff, but even after spending the last 20 years modernizing, most of their equipment still is Soviet tier or questionable quality and at least a bad decade of the 90s sitting in Siberian winter.
A fun exercise to do on this is check out the Wikipedia article on some of the weapon systems (e.g. Su-27). It's a long list of official announcements about modernization upgrades to their systems that were supposed to be completed years ago but no updates. Taken at face value, they've modernized at least 120% of their arsenal. These articles also tend to have a very distinct "tone" hyping them up, mentioning grandiose claims from officials or random professor at Irkutsk Technical Institute for Thermochemicalphysics No 7, or just bringing up bizarre comparisons to other competitor systems. You pick up on that after reading enough wiki articles, which is consistent with their strategy of hyping their capabilities and strong propaganda.
Hopefully this all remains armchair general speculation and the world never finds out.
Yeah those are good defense systems. But I think the idea that they could invade NATO is unfounded. I'm armchairing but while I do think they have some very good weapons that seems impossible to me. I do really like their engineering and I do believe Russia is treated unfairly and that we should try to be their allies to counter China.
NATO should haves been dissolved when the cold war ended. The US is ramping up to 100,000 troops stationed in europe and is building new bases in Poland. What's going on between Russia and former Russia doesn't matter at all to us. It should be let go and the only thing we should do is peace talks. Oh wait, we won't do peace talks because the US took a stance of indefinitely supporting Ukraine. A country that is not at all our ally. The US gov needs to let go, not the Russians.