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I think you always need to try to think how other people are thinking. I believe the Great Don Vito Corleone said something like that along with The Art of War.
I will admit to being wrong on Putins mental state. I thought he was a cold but rational master strategist. Perhaps he was once that and in old age he’s slipping.
I thought Russian elites want to live in the west once they have money (still think this is largely true) and Putin was largely one of those people.
I thought Russia would largely be happy atleast the elites with making money selling commodities to the west.
One thing is the worlds gotten weird since COVID. Far more irrational decision making. So many weird things. Academics not being willing to break certain ideological lines. News that seems purely propaganda. Riots in American cities over largely fake stats. Republicans having a legitimate riot - largely expected something like the boring normal gop tea party protest. China seems to be killing themselves with zero COVID. San Francisco and Chicago giving up their livable pro-business governance with an agreement they pay public sector workers well and turning into poop city and in Chicagos case unlivable actual murder/theft on the business class.
Honestly sometimes it just seems like lockdowns rotted everyone’s brains.
In Putin's case, I blame oil prices giving him delusions of Russia being great again, or at least having the opportunity to project its power with minimal consequences. That led to the South Ossetian war, which scared many Ukrainians, but probably not enough to make them consider joining the EU/NATO if oil prices had remained high. The 2014 invasion of Ukraine happened to occur at the end of the 2011-2014 oil price spike, right before the 2014-2016 dip. That intervention would presumably have gone easier for Russia if oil prices had remained high for a decade or more. That intervention created a series of entanglements that Putin cannot free Russia from without losing face on a regime-threatening scale.
January 2022-February 2022 saw crude oil prices return to a little above their trend levels. Maybe Putin thought that, if he could act when oil prices were at the start of a 3-5 year boom, this would give him the room to sort things out in Ukraine. Of course, he also underestimated Ukrainian resistance, but a lot of rational and well-informed people did that. I mean, I did that, and I'm the smartest, most well-informed, and most handsome person I know.
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