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I have a mental model of Putin that I believe has held up well, though I can't claim anything like complete predictive power. I think his goals are Russian-nationalist; his preferred methods are more security-state than economic; and his beliefs include survival requires growth.
The post-Cold-War 90s were a massive paradox, nowhere more sharply felt than Russia. If you'd asked a Soviet citizen of the late 70s or early 80s, "imagine the range of possible outcomes where the USSR decisively loses the Cold War within the next 10-15 years," the real outcome would have been dismissed as a ludicrously optimistic drug-induced fever dream. At the same time, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting economic chaos in Russia were deeply traumatic on a societal level.
When Putin came to power, he was looking at a cratered population replacement rate that by the numbers predicted that Russia would not be a viable nation-state by 2100. Reversing this trend became his life's work. In order to create a Russia that would choose to produce the next generation, Putin needed to rebuild a sense of pride and accomplishment that had been savagely damaged by the failure and collapse of the Soviet Union. Not only had the Cold War ended in Soviet defeat, it had ended with an American triumph, and the prosperity-bordering-on-decadence of the American 90s only made the Russian dislocations cut more deeply. I don't know to what extent Putin's anti-Americanism is ideological, but I think it's sufficiently explained by a strategic choice to build up Russian confidence by undermining American successes and pushing for American failures.
(A sadly common mistake in the US is to insist on putting Putin in our cultural context rather than his own. "Putin is a Trump supporter! Putin is a fan of Hillary!" No. Putin prefers Putin and/or Russia. To the extent that he cares about American leadership, he'd prefer the self-sabotage of poor decisions generally, and any policy choices that gives him a freer hand to operate elsewhere.)
In the case of Ukraine, I think Putin was taking steps to re-establish Russian Great Power status by enforcing a sphere of influence. I was also quite surprised by his full-bore invasion including a major strike towards Kyiv; I thought he'd continue the salami-slicing tactics of the past 10 years in Georgia and Crimea, this time with the Donbass as his target. Evidently, he decided that the Western non-response to the salami-slicing indicated a weakness that he was free to exploit with escalation to large scale conquest. He was wrong, on a great number of levels.
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