If they manage to get it back under control now, then we'll know if they could have gotten it under control post-pandemic. If not, we're all fucked anyway and not many people may care to research the answer to the question.

This is why the timing of the invasion is, for want of a better word, "perfect" if you're someone who wants to watch the world burn (assuming that "the world" was primarily the Western World with its heaviest dependence upon "stuff").

As the pandemic appears to be easing, the interest rate hike (first step as a reaction to the inflation problem) a month away. The timing of the invasion was both exquisite and horrendous.

Inflation was long before Putin.

Also worth noting that no one expected the US to impose sanctions of this severity. Even a month ago, President Biden himself would not have thought we would react this way. But Twitter hysteria struck again and imposing harsher and harsher sanctions—and in the private sector, voluntarily withdrawing from the Russian economy even when sanctions did not require it—became a way to demonstrate your holiness. Rational calculation and self-preservation, out the window. We live in a Twitter world order now.

You can tell this was unplanned because back in January, with the invasion looming, US officials said (even if they did not completely mean it) that sanctions would be narrowly targeted to hurt the Russian elite but not the common people. Now, the explicit goal of the sanctions is to cripple the Russian economy and cause mass suffering sufficient to collapse support for the Russian government. If this was the plan all along, we would have said so. Deterrence only works if the other guy sees it coming.

What did you expect the west to do in this situation? Let Putin get on with it unscathed? This is the rational alternative to World War III.

The announced US policy was yes, to let Russia as a whole mostly get away with it, but to hit the Russian elite specifically with very harsh but specifically targeted sanctions. The red line was NATO territory + de facto NATO members like Finland, not Ukraine.