And for the record, Putin's motivation is obvious. In 2014, the puppet administration of Yanakovych was overthrown and a democratically-elected administration of Zelensky is what resulted. Putin responded with military force in an attempt to break-off "Novo Russiya" from Ukraine. He has since sponsored civil war in its eastern provinces to grab more sections of this polity that hasn’t existed since the heyday of the Russian empire.

Why he chose to mount a full-scale invasion at this point is the subject of ongoing debate, but it seems obvious to me it's because he was lamenting the loss of another puppet (Trump) and needed a war to distract from Russia's economic woes and his mounting paranoia about his inner circle. If nothing else, he did it now because his obsession with Zelensky finally boiled over.

Your appraisal of Putin was interesting in terms of how you were so half-way with your condemnation. "Semi-dictatorial" doesn't begin to describe him. He came to power amid a false flag operation that killed countless Russians, he suppressed the Special Counsel investigation, murdered the people chairing it, killed any and all whistleblowers and journalists who have tried to look into it, and murdered any and all political rivals.

The man is a carbon cutout totalitarian who has followed the same playbook as Hitler to obtain and remain in power. This was his Sudeten Crisis, except that it backfired horribly.