Putin already had his plans to expand the Russian territory to its “rightful” place as he saw, looking at the history of the Russian Empire and Soviet times. He was going to invade Georgia and Ukraine regardless of what anyone did in the west. One of his senior foreign ministry secretaries told us this in the early 2000s before he was silenced. The conversation was about Finland joining NATO at the time (2005-2007), which I was having with a Finnish military guy who had married into a Russian family, that just happened to have these connections inside the Russian Foreign Ministry. My Finnish friend died a few years later.
The crap about the US pushing Putin into invading Ukraine is really Russian propaganda, nothing more. There are no 2-ways about it, because these things were already planned way in advance. Putin needed to revitalize the Russian military though. He truly envied what he saw the US do in Desert Storm, where we brutally skull-crushed the 4th largest army in the world, which was mainly comprised of later-model Russian and Soviet systems. His Ratnik initiative, assisted by the freaking Germans, went into effect once he got Russian energy on its feet for several years.
The plan for Ukraine was stacked totally in his favor, with strategic encirclement and force numerical superiority of 7:1. If I was standing around the Russian general staff at the massive planning cell table, looking at the map and listening to them saying, “There’s no way we won’t be successful here.”, I would have totally been on-board with that from a strict planning and strategy perspective.
Jan 2022 map:
They literally had Ukraine surrounded. The Ukraine major offensive was supposed to go down in the Hillary Clinton Administration though, once Putin had enough time with gas at over $100/barrel under Madame Hillary’s "kill-US" energy policies.
Since Trump upset the apple cart, Putin had to wait because Trump crushed the Russian energy sector with his US-focused low-priced energy. That delayed the Ukraine invasion, and then Trump sent
hundreds of millions worth of anti-tank and anti-ship weapons to Ukraine under FMS from Mar 2018-forward. Ukraine paid for them too. You can see that clearly in DSCA FMS sales tracking, which I have monitored pretty closely for decades as normal order of business.
If we were making a movie or documentary about this, and started from 1989 through Jan 2022, the events from Feb 2022-present would not make any sense at all to us. Because we are living through it, it’s extremely difficult to see context and have clarity.