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Notes -
Obviously they have little to show for it now. Because they failed at the blitzkrieg. They were never supposed to expend this many resources - just as they didn't in Crimea 8 years ago. We would be in a different world if they hadn't. Just as Iraq wouldn't look so inexplicably silly if Cheney and co. really had been able to make it into a functioning democracy.
As for what Russia wanted, it's still unclear how maximalist their goals were but there are some solid potential benefits Putin was looking at :
Annexing eastern Ukraine and gaining a land bridge to Crimea - which is currently being served by a bridge that - as this war has proven - can be disabled, creating problems for supplying Putin's "big win". The first part of this we can be relatively confident of cause Naryshkin accidentally spilled the plan when Putin was hammering him
Placing a puppet on a diminished Ukraine's throne to prevent or rollback any flirting with the EU and NATO.
Russia is facing demographic and imperial decline. Russian Ukrainians would - if assimilated - be a boon and keeping Ukraine (the second largest post-Soviet state) onside are more than reasonable goals.
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