Ukraine by comparison has at best 14,500 personnel, 10 naval vessels that are still perilously berthed at Sevastopol just up the bay from their Russian adversaries.
Battling the same enemy, the old adversaries have found themselves a common cause.
While these speculations are premature and flirt with wishful thinking, it makes geostrategic sense for the two adversaries to set aside their mutual hostility to address common concerns in the Middle East.
He was respected as much by his opponents as by adversaries within his own party and, at times of strife, by the warring factors within the mining industry, which he was proud to call his own.
"This is a purely political stunt aimed at tearing up the goodwill and the good progress that's been made between hostile adversaries in the forestry debate".
As Huw Richards puts it in this retrospective article for ESPN: "Trench warfare, which periodically sent men over the top in doomed assaults on machine-gun toting adversaries, might have been designed specifically as a means of killing rugby players".
He said she was worse than the FN's political opponents – the rightwing UMP and French Socialist party – because "those adversaries fight you to your face, she is stabbing me in the back".
Journalists who grew up in a world when Moscow and the west were equal adversaries feel comfortable in this narrative.
Meanwhile his old adversaries at the Serious Fraud Office have seen their authority severely eroded after a series of bungled prosecutions, culminating in the election campaign proposal to merge it with the other regulatory authorities.
But though the UN-sponsored Special Tribunal for Lebanon has yet to convene or to charge anyone for the crimes, the impending trial threatens not only to reignite a firestorm in Lebanon, but also to spread sectarian tensions across the Middle East and to vex relations even more between the region's big adversaries, Iran and the United States.
In practice their countries often act as adversaries.
