- Russia overestimated their position
- Russia believed the war would be over in a few days (which many in the West also believed)
- Russia assumed Europe would keep buying their oil (which has happened to an extent)
- Russia believes they can "out-suffer" the West and we will crack after a few months
- Russia believed the West was too polarized to reach consensus on an effective response
In short, Russia had a bad read on the situation and shot themselves in the foot. They thought they were in a position to impose their will without a fight or a significant response from the West.
We have seen a little bit of the same attitude from China the past several years - decadent West on the decline, democracy is flawed, etc. - but I have to think they are smart enough to realize they have been underestimating us. At a minimum, I think it pushes back their timeline for when they believed they would become the world's premier power. Hopefully, that buys us all some time to cool off and find diplomatic solutions.
Both can prosper when things go good, it's when shit hits the fan that you notice the difference.
Russia’s economy is supported by oil. Oil is pretty much the one thing that they’ve still been consistently able to export.
China’s economy is based on exporting lots and lots and lots of manufactured goods. Many of them are essential, but many of them could be banned tomorrow.
How Russia got itself to the point where one person has consolidated all authority, surrounded himself with corrupt sycophants, and cannot accurately gather or integrate information from the rest of the society is the complicated question here. It’s a pretty good demonstration for anyone watching around the world that unchecked power can lead to disastrous decisions. It should inspire us to stand up for democracy and against corruption and consolidation of wealth and power in our own societies.
It’s impossible to determine Putin’s personal motivations from outside; the best we can do is speculate. My speculation is that involves some combination of (a) doing what he thinks will best maintain internal political control, (b) satisfying an egoistical urge for historical glory, and (c) a narcissistic belief that others must bow to his personal whims and a raging narcissistic grudge when they do not.
Pretty sure in reality it's not one man alone doing crazy decisions without the whole state organ being behind him.
Invading Ukraine certainly wasn’t, say, Elvira Nabiullina’s choice, or the choice of the oligarchs with homes in London or NYC. The turnover rate at the top ranks of the Russian military the past 6 months is higher than a typical McDonalds.
Russia has no convenient geographic features to protect it from invasion, so it relies on long distances. Those distances are much shorter than they used to be, and Russian doctrine for at least the past decade has been focused on creating confusion and chaos in Eastern Europe. The chaos is here, and they probably misread the international community on what they could get away with.
Now that they're in it, though, I think Putin is the biggest obstacle to Russia extricating themselves from the debacle.
Entitlement. The closest you came was the descriptor "narcissistic" in (c). Narcissism is supposed to be a rare condition, but it is found everywhere. It is easiest to understand leaders like Putin, Jong-un, Xi, DeSantis and Trump, if framed in psychological terms like narcissism with symptoms of entitlement, grandiosity, attention seeking, arrogance, bullying, lack of empathy, and a fear of criticism.
Meanwhile, China exports a lot of things that people don’t need. You can turn those off quicker.
Again — huge oversimplifications. But I think reasonably solid mental model.
It's not like that's all they export. They export a lot of essential things, and cutting them off would probably far more economically disruptive to their customers than to them. They're store shelves won't be empty, and given their political system they can probably deal with the fallout much more effectively.
There are also a lot of alternative producers of oil, while there's no other advanced manufacturing giant on the scale of China that people can shift their orders to. It would make the COVID supply chain difficulties look like a joke.
Russia starting a nuclear war would be bad for China, India and others; there's some point at which they'll cut off Russian trade.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewelinaochab/2022/09/22/new-mas...
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/09/europe/gallery/mariupol-h...