We don't need to speculate here, Putin has been quite open with his weird attempts at being a historian, that he openly publishes and which make his worldview e

We don't need to speculate here, Putin has been quite open with his weird attempts at being a historian, that he openly publishes and which make his worldview extremely clear. Ignoring these works from his own hand, would be as hopeless as understanding Hitler's motivations without understanding Mein Kampf. Putin views "Ukraine" as not a real nation, and Ukrainians as a subservient people that belong to the Russian empire and specifically to him, as the ruler of the Russian empire. Too "close" to the West/NATO is not the real issueg, rather it's the audacity of a subservient race pretending that they don't owe everything to the racially superior Russians. I run into this all the time with Russians, even here on HN. They view all Slavic people as "little Russians" and their personal serfs. All the other Slavic countries as "little Russias" that belong to their true master Slavic nation. And this worldview is 100% consistent with Putin's actions. He never thought that Ukrainians could ever resist, because they are supposed to be inherently inferior to Russians. And for the moment, that is kinda working in Belarus, and it worked in Georgia, but Ukraine has been different. Ukraine has been preparing for the past 8 years, purging all the traitors from their army, and working on removing Russian corruption. And really Ukrainians are fundamentally different from Russians. Ukrainians experienced Stalin and thought about what they could do to prevent it in the future. Russians view the terribleness of bad leaders as something like the weather, or a natural disaster: they take no agency when it comes to their rulers, they are sheep, but they console themselves with their perceived racial superiority over the other subjects of the empire. The other subjects are not the same...