hiddeneagle98 said:Since 2014, Putin has been systematically prepping Russia—economically, financially, and structurally—to withstand sanctions. He’s been building up military bases right along the Ukrainian border, fracturing the internet, seizing total control over the Russian media landscape, and flooding the airwaves with propaganda designed to brainwash both the Russian people and useful idiots across the globe. Of course, he also went out of his way to make sure Europe stayed hooked on Russian gas. It was all part of a calculated effort to ensure that moving those troops to the border felt more like a bluff during some forced negotiations rather than a genuine threat.
It turns out he also poured massive resources into bribing Ukrainians, all so he could try to steamroll through the country like a shallow creek with an army that, frankly, doesn't even look big enough for a full-scale invasion. He expected them to just roll over and welcome him with flowers. He was so damn certain of his victory that he actually risked delaying the "operation" just to cater to Xia's interests, even with the seasonal muddiest roads nearly upon us.
Precisely. But Putin’s preparations started much earlier; the occupation of Georgia and Crimea were merely testing the waters to see how the West would react. When the response was largely negligible, he simply resumed his previous local business, assuming the green light had been given.
He kept Ukraine trapped in a corrupt economic chess match via various proxies. The reality was that even the oligarchs realized they couldn't expand their influence within Ukraine as if it were a Russian province, because they occupied such low rungs on Putin's power ladder. In that system, any ambitious entrepreneur had to satisfy local bosses, the local government, and Putin’s proxies simultaneously. Consequently, Ukraine was riddled with these "security men" right up until 2014, all of whom were tethered directly to the Kremlin. A state cannot function normally when it possesses two parallel systems of authority—the legal one and a shadow one (which might be the mafia, or a political faction—similar to what we see in some parts of the US). A nation can only have one true seat of power; you must know who holds it and how that power shifts. If a political system is incapable of purging all other levers of power from the game, then it doesn't truly hold power—it merely performs the role of holding it. After the Maidan, the Kremlin lost many of its levers of control within Ukraine. For them, this was an intolerable situation; they realized they were abruptly losing their grip on the country. That loss of influence became the final catalyst for the invasion.