Butschi

You know this is what I can’t get past either.  Up until now Putin has been pretty careful and demonstrated nuance and sophistication in his strategies.  The list of successes is quite long, all based on careful manipulation of narrative, subversive tactics and a brilliant divide and conquer effort aimed at the west, US specifically.   Georgia, Estonia, Crimea, Donbas v1.0, Syria, the Arm-Azer conflict, democratic interference  and even in far flung corners like Africa Russia has been pulling off a string of wins by getting inside our calculus and leaving us in the west unable to decide what to do.
Then suddenly Putin wakes up one morning and says to himself, “hell let’s see if all out war will work”…?  Does not add up.  Further, what is the crisis worth risking all this?  Some say Ukraine entry into NATO but it was not like they were having the induction ceremony this week.  There was plenty of rumbling in the west to slow roll Ukraine entry for this exact reason.  So why the sudden need for extreme escalation?  
From a political and strategic perspective this does not make a lot of sense.  The risks are very high, the long term costs also high, so what is the pay off here?  It is too easy to say “he is crazy”, but he has not demonstrated this level of irrationality before.  It like there has been a glitch in the Matrix.  I am sure they will be trying to figure this one out for some time.

Long time forum lurker here. Very interesting discussion and also a good source for informations, thank you for that.
I too wonder what Putin's end game could be. A week ago I would have been willing to bet good money on that Putin is just bluffing. Not even that, so far I actually had the impression that he is more into Chess than Poker. More or less everything he did so far was rather rational or calculated. Georgia and Eastern Ukraine were obvous consequence of both countries being considered NATO candidates by some. Keeping some kind of frozen conflict going is an "easy" way to prevent a country from joining NATO. The intervention in Syria meant the West had to talk to Russia again, meaning it was a major power again not some regional power as Obama once called the country. And because NATO and especially the US did not exactly behave like saints during the last decades, Putin had made good progress in deviding Europe and the US along several fault lines.
Now this... I don't know. Playing a bit smarter Putin would certainly have been able to gain a lot of concessions. So it seems, gaining anything via negociations seems to never have been his goal. What I find really disturbing is this: If he is really playing poker and still seeks to destroy or at the very least severly weaken NATO, he could go all in. Attacking Poland is out of the question, I think. But the Baltic states... Having Ukraine and Belarus, Russia would be in a very good position to cut off reinforcments for the Baltic or at least make the effort costly. Combined with a threat that any intervention would immediatly be answered with all out nuclear war (remember also, the latest generation of Russian nuclear missiles is causing NATO some headache), the ball would be firmly in NATO's court: Risk nuclear annihilation for waging war that would be difficult to win even if the war stayed conventional? Mourir pour Dantzig (or Riga, for that matter)? Of course, what would NATO be worth, then?
Sounds way too Tom Clancy or Larry Bond, I would have said a week ago, but now...