Putin’s been in power for over 20 years. By this point, everything about him, his goals, and his desires are pretty well known, and because of this it’s easier to predict what he will and won’t do.
This is what I was saying up until a few days ago, and I turned out to be very wrong.
Before this latest war, Putin had a consistent playbook. Take advantage of internal turmoil in neighboring states to gin up paranoia about imminent attacks on Russian minorities. Use this paranoia as cover to send in clandestine forces to prop up unrecognized, pseudo-independent puppet states in heavily ethnically Russian or Russian-aligned regions at the fringes of said neighboring states. Put out a bunch of propaganda for domestic audiences about how he is saving Russians abroad from imminent genocide or whatever. Gradually integrate the puppet states closer and closer with Russia proper. Rinse and repeat as the opportunity arises.
Many observers suspected that this was primarily to gin up domestic political support to allow Putin to easily stay in power - and there was some evidence for that, as his popularity surged every time he did something like this. Maybe this was his real goal originally, but something has now clearly changed. Based on what I've read, Putin has become much more personally nationalistic than he was 20 years ago. He's become obsessed with his place in Russian history, has become convinced that the former Soviet republics that became independent when the USSR collapsed are rightful Russian clay and had no right to go their own way, and sees an opportunity for himself to go down in Russian history as the man who restored his nation to its former glory after decades of humiliation. Now his approach to geopolitics has changed to reflect that.
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