You know, the obvious parallel to the situation with Russia and Ukraine is America and Cuba. Like, the latters were officially ~sovereign and independent~ of the neighboring major power, but come on. So when another major power tried to poach them under the guise of ~purely domestic~ “revolution”, naturally their suzerain raised an army (with reciprocal arms-length disclaimablity as “local forces”) to take it back.

Like, the parallel even extends as far as the nearby power not even bothering with the pretense of independence w/r/t the naval base from which they dominate the regional sea.

War games are fun until somebody gets hurt

Pf. For my money, the correct moves for Putin in case of NATO-Russia conflict would be first, to to push the Syrian conflict into a regional war and fan the Arab Spring embers in the Maghreb, which would create a second(/third) theater for Europe that he didn’t have to supply himself and also create massive, destabilizing refugee flows - there’d be domestic pressure to keep naval assets that could go to the Black Sea at home in the Mediterranean for (take your pick) interdiction or humanitarian assistance, and it’d drive a wedge between the existing internationalist regimes and the continent’s right-nationalist challengers (any electoral victory by which would both weaken the NATO coalition and reinforce his domestic “let’s do WWII again” rhetoric of Russia as an anti-fascist counterweight).

And second, to try and strike way behind the American lines by stirring up a civil war - people tend to interpret his moves to ratchet up “Christian traditionalist vs. gay atheist” tensions as a purely domestic thing and that’s a mistake. Dude came up through the KGB.