I think so too. I think Putin is very naive, even gullible and frankly in some ways kind of stupid. I think even now he still believes that he can get along with the West if only more sensible people were to come to power. I just don’t think he gets it. He is and remains a diehard liberal to his core.

I don’t think he’s playing 4D chess as some would like to believe. I think he only ever made the right decision once all other possibilities had been exhausted and all other avenues were closed to Russia by events and powers outside of his control. And i also think he got exceedingly lucky in having inherited - even crippled as it was by the catastrophe of the 1990s - a very strong industrial base and enough remnants of the institutional legacy of the Soviet Union in the state, educational and social apparatus of Russia to coast on far enough for Russia’s enemies to blunder their way to self-inflicted defeat.

I can’t even give him credit for betting on China because that too was done only once it was the last real option he still had. Only once it became painfully clear what the global trajectory was, whose power was on the rise and whose was declining. He just hitched his wagon to the winning horse.

What else could they do? After trying for eight years to negotiate with the West a solution for the civil war in Ukraine and for a rethinking of the security architecture in Europe in a way that doesn’t existentially threaten Russia with NATO missile systems on its largest and most vulnerable border? What could they do after warning the West for twenty plus years to stop expanding NATO as that expansion threatens to destabilize the entire European security situation? What else could they do when NATO by 2022 had built up a huge army in Ukraine poised to invade the Donbass republics and unleash Kiev’s Nazis to cause a bloodbath, seeking revenge upon the rebels who resisted them for eight years? What could they do when the Kiev regime states it would ethnically cleanse millions of Russians from their homes? When the Kiev regime openly and repeatedly announces its intent to conquer Crimea next after subduing the Donbass? What could they do when Zelensky goes to the Munich security conference and announces that his Nazi regime intends to acquire nuclear weapons and the collective West just sits there and applauds?

As for your second question, i honestly don’t know. And i don’t think the Russians knew for sure either. That is the kind of thing that you can only really know once you try it. Militarily it would definitely have been easier. Economically however… The Russians themselves were surprised at how well their economy withstood these post 2022 sanctions. I think they fully expected to take a much bigger hit even after all of the preparations they had made. But they were ready to accept that hit because by 2022 they had no other choice. I don’t know how politically viable would it have been to go into a full scale economic war with the West with the much weaker economic situation eight years prior, a situation in which they were still heavily dependent on the West. Would their population have accepted to bear the economic crisis if they weren’t yet convinced that their government had tried every other possible solution to resolve the crisis diplomatically? Or would that have played right into the hands of the West causing mass discontent and a fall of the government?