Ukraine (Mod Note & Threadbanned Users in OP)

On the face of it he doesn't appear to be under any pressure internally. He's been in power for 22 years. He has a submissive media and a neutered opposition. He has created a vertical power structure that means that nobody in his party has anywhere near his power and those closest to him tend to be long term loyalists whose relationship with him, in many cases, stretch back decades.

At the same time his regime has been more repressive in recent times then at any period in the past two decades. His biggest critic, Alexei Navalny, has been locked up (having previously survived a botched FSB assassination attempt) and now looks set to face new charges to keep him there for the long term. His courts shuttered the oldest civil rights group in the country, Memorial, a few months ago. In the past few years approval ratings for Putin have dropped from the highs of the 80s after the invasion of Crimea to the 60s. This mirrors a fall in GDP/Capita during that same period.

With regards to Ukraine, nothing has changed in recent years. The conflict in the east has been frozen for years. NATO hasn't been making any overtures to Kiev in recent times. That would make it seem more likely that Putin is reacting to internal pressures than external ones. Perhaps he wants to pull off the same trick that he did in 2014 where the annexation of Crimea, without a shot being fired, was almost universally praised within Russia and led to soaring approval of Putin.

This isn't Crimea though. Any invasion of Ukraine now will be met with resistance. Russia's army is far more powerful than Ukraine's but it will still incur losses and beyond that it could find itself bogged down in a quagmire facing guerilla tactics from a well armed local population.

What should be even more troubling for Putin though is the potential for meaningful sanctions against the Russian elite. When Revolutions occur it's almost always disaffected elite who are involved in setting the wheels in motion. Powerful people don't mind playing second fiddle to leaders so long as they get looked after themselves. There's always been an unwritten pact in the upper echelons of Putin's Russian society - The oligarchs don't interfere in politics and stump up cash when required and in return they are free to amass great wealth and funnel it out of the country. Mikhail Khodorkovsky was once the richest man in Russia but he tried to get involved in politics and ended up in prison for his troubles and now lives in exile.

If Russia invades Ukraine it is very likely that the USA and UK will go after these elites and their families. That means things like potentially preventing their children from studying in elite institutes as well as freezing assets. That's the sort of thing that should concern Putin.

At the same time, if the Russian army packs up and heads back to their bases without Putin being seen to have achieved any of his demands, he is going to look weak. He likely won't get the same bump in domestic support that he got after Crimea and whatever issues that were troubling him before all of this will till be there. That may be the lesser of two evils for him at this stage.

When referring to the ramp up in repressions in recent times I neglected to mention that there are apparently now more political prisoners in Russian prisons then at any time since the fall of Communism. One of Memorial's sins was detailing this fact (along with not toeing the Kremlin line on air-brushing Stalin's atrocities out of history).

While this is certainly possible surely this could have been achieved without the mass mobilisation of all of those troops? (Unless you're saying that this is some kind of secondary option)

So this seems to be their hook:

I can only assume that this message is for domestic consumption since nobody else is going to swallow such a ludicrous lie.

It might also be a wink to the NATO bombing of the Serbs in 1999 - a campaign which was partly predicated on the basis that the Serbs were massacring Kosovar Albanian civilians. Serbia (who are close allies of Russia) denied this.

The truth is that nobody really knows. Only Putin knows what his intentions are and even they may be subject to events. He may have had a range of options from the outset. These would have ranged in severity from:

1. Kick up a fuss with no intention of attacking in order to force concessions from the West such as reducing/removing sanctions on Russia and ensuring that Ukraine never accepts NATO
2. Send troops into Donetsk and Luhansk in order to push forward the area of control so that both provinces are entirely controlled by Russia. This would include the strategic port of Mariupol.
3. Same as above except seize the entire Baltic sea coastline all the way to Crimea
4. Seize everywhere west of the river Dniepr - roughly 50% of the country
5. Seize the entire country

Right now it seems that things are going to move beyond #1. Perhaps he isn't even considering #4 or #5 due to the difficulties of controlling such a large area. Nobody knows for sure.

As to the why of it, again we have to look at Putin. I think there are 2 main reasons for this:

1. A genuine, deep seated, grievance about the collapse of the Soviet Union and it's standing in the world
2. The fear of another former soviet republic moving away from the Russian sphere of influence

If Putin can take action now that manages to make Russian look strong and hobbles any efforts by Ukraine to move closer to the EU and specifically NATO then that seems to be an action that he's willing to take.

An interesting problem arises here though. Every time Russia attacks Ukraine or cleaves off more of its territory for itself it not only concentrates the ethnic Ukrainian population in the remainder of the country but it also turns them increasingly against Russia. Before 2014 only 15% of Ukrainians wanted to join NATO. Now that figure is up around 50%. If the Russian's manage to depose the current Ukrainian president in any free and fair election he would likely be replaced by a Ukrainian nationalist. The only way to prevent that is to have a permanent occupying force in the country. That opens that force up to guerilla attacks from the local population. This was the exact problem that Russia faced in Chechnya but Chechnya is a tiny republic. Ukraine is 40 times larger with about 40 times the population. I cannot see how Russia could maintain control of large sections of Ukraine in the long run without incurring large and continuous losses of life amongst their ranks.

That means that I think the most likely scenario is for the Russians to only seize territory with large numbers of Russians. They can then leave the threat of further encroachments hanging over the rest of the country in perpetuity. Basically just an extension of the status quo.