>>« occasional sabotage operations in Western Europe » – You mean like when the US (plus allies) sabotaged the Nord Stream pipeline?

When is the last time you refreshed your knowledge about this? It's my current understanding that Ukrainians performed this sabotage.

> The US is providing the bulk of the weapons

Not anymore, and even during the earlier period this has caveats. https://app.23degrees.io/view/j4luMuv8fnpO2frL-bar-grouped-v...

> massive new military bases in Eastern Europe

Trump said he would, then cancelled it; what was actually done was reduce troop numbers. As you yourself note, he's not honest, so look at what he did not what he said.

Even if they did though, so what? Deployment in a nation whose borders are around 550 km from the closest bit of the fighting are not a serious threat.

> You mean like when the US (plus allies) sabotaged the Nord Stream pipeline?

Nobody except those responsible knows for sure who did that. There's some trials for Ukrainians accused of involvement, which would have been a crazy move if they were guilty because if they were caught and flagged as Ukrainian at the time, the act of destruction would have risked immediate loss of support from EU nations they were critically dependent on. Then again, as the thing wasn't actually delivering fuel because its certification had been suspended because of the Russian annexation of even more of Ukraine, I find myself unable to name anyone who had non-crazy motivations to attack it.

> There's been no other sabotage operations in Europe of comparable scale by at least two orders of magnitude.

In real warfare, single big strikes are seldom the most relevant. There have been many smaller acts of sabotage, which are fairly easy to attribute to Russia, and the EU response has been to downplay these acts because we actually would rather not take Russia seriously unless forced to.

The core of it is: ruzzian troops in another country. All the rest follows from this.