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...which one? Do you figure there is some priority list of countries he wants to invade? What does it look like?
The Russian view there is quite different - as they contend, at some point after the early 2000s, Ukraine started responding to its economic malaise by stealing gas meant for transit to EU customers to help itself meet its own demand, with some complicity from EU states who refused to hold Ukraine responsible for this diplomatically while also working to sabotage any projects for new pipelines that would bypass Ukraine completely (in EU propaganda, this was framed as the bypass pipelines "enabling Russia to blackmail Ukraine" - as in, blackmail it with the threat of taking away the free gas). If a nuclear-armed Ukraine becomes a pariah in your scenario, is the dominant consequence that its economy is in even more shambles (so it needs to steal more gas) or that the EU objections to bypass pipelines disappear (so it never gets the opportunity to steal as much gas)?
A scenario in which Russia still depends on them for transit but now they are even more desperate to extract unnegotiated concessions for it may not be one in which Russia sees it as friendly. Certainly, my memory is that even in reality, the gas siphoning resulted in a lot of grassroots resentment towards Ukraine among Russians at the time, to the point that they could have easily been persuaded to endorse some punitive aggression against it by a thus inclined statesman.
(I find it interesting that the gas transit story is never mentioned in mainstream reporting on the war, not even with a framing that puts all the blame on Russia. Through my conspiracy goggles, this looks like another instance of a general pattern of producing simple good/evil narratives by cutting off history at a convenient point - in the media, the Israel/Palestine war started on 24-10-07, Russia/Ukraine started in 2014 with a little exemption for the Budapest Memorandum in murky prehistory, and everyone/Iran started with the Islamic Revolution. No hard questions about who shot first. Not that this is new - America/Japan, they claim, started with Pearl Harbor, too.)
Wasn't it just propaganda? Just like Russia banned Latvian canned fish imported to Russia every time they had a dispute about Soviet legacy in Latvia and the status of Russian language? On flimsy pretense that the fish was spoiled, or whatever. I still remember numerous reports on Russian state TV about Latvians trying to poison Russian population with their rotten fish, Georgians -- with their vine, Moldavians — with their apples...
The same with "stolen" gas -- you still need to keep "technical gas" inside the pipes to keep the pressure, and as countries westward of Ukraine still consumed their (as they paid for it), Ukraine had to siphon gas off some in order to keep operating the compressor stations. EU also didn't find any proof that the gas was stolen IIRC. But at the core, Russians hated that Yushchenko was the president of Ukraine, and not their puppet Yanukovych. That's why they raised the price of the gas from something like $50 to $250 in the first place -- as to pressure Ukraine to submit.
True. But if you do your diligence, you'll find that we (Russians) were rarely good guys.
My understanding is that some amount of actual stealing took place and was admitted to early on (the 2005 end of the dispute), and after that it was mostly arcane contractual disputes which can best be approximated by something like: Russia was selling gas to Ukraine at well-below-market/charity rates while it was a puppet state, but wanted to start charging market after they had the revolution to bring in the pro-Western guy, which Ukraine couldn't afford (and they might already have been in arrears from before), and so UA decided to basically hold westward transit hostage to demand continued sub-market deliveries (and may either have stolen gas from transit attempts, or asserted a contractual right to take it; hard to find objective information); while the Western states, having alternatives and not liking the idea that Ukraine would be incentivised with cheap gas to not be pro-Western, approved of this process.
This means as little in the context as if Russia found "proof", since the EU wanted to back their own puppet. If we wanted objective information, perhaps we should have put an Indian investigative team on the case as they did in the Korean war...
Eh. My reading is that at least in several of the post-'90s conflicts, their moral batting average was pretty average. I do think it was evil on the strategic level that they essentially wanted to keep Ukraine perpetually poor and dependent, though the exact ways in which they did it seem more business-as-usual to me; on the other hand, e.g. in Georgia 2008, I think they were morally in the right (Georgia shot first, and I don't see their moral claim to the separatist areas). Chechnya, and the quite possibly false-flag apartment bombings - evil, for sure (though I think the Chechens were/are also a nasty bunch, so it was black-on-dark-grey warfare like the US invasion of Afghanistan). In the case of Transnistria, I also don't see Moldova's moral claim.
More importantly, though, I think it doesn't matter because orthogonally to interior politics, the post-WWII US (and friends) is more evil than Russia. (I mean, just in this year, Israel has killed more civilians in Gaza than Russia has in Ukraine for the whole duration of the war!) I'd rather have zero tyrants on the world stage than one, but if we have to have at least one, I'd rather have 2+, so they at least have to throw some morsels to us in the NPC countries occasionally lest we all align with the respective other. When I argue against the morality of the US camp, it's strictly in the service of the implications of this viewpoint: a world in which every credible challenger to the US has been neutered is worse than the one we currently inhabit.
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A quick list from wiki of actual wars he/Russia involved in since 1991:
I think this is quite an impressive list of wars within 21 years
I think Putim start these war due to internal political struggles, like, start and win a war is one of easiest war to remain in power for political leaders, democracy or dictatorship. Remember the prelude of 2022 Ukrainian war was Ukraine will fall within a few months, this is the public consensus of the world at the time
I don't believe Ukraine will becomes a pariah at all, Pakistan did not become a pariah with their much worst actions.
On the gas stealing part, I think Ukraine will either not have the chance of stealing due to new pipelines bypassing them which lead to a less prosper Ukraine, or no new pipelines bypassing them while Ukraine in a much better stand to negotiate trading agreements with Russia without the fear of being invaded.
All in all, I think Russia instead will attempt to culturally and economically influence Ukraine so that Ukraine stay within their sphere of influence which justify the cheap selling of gas to Ukraine.
As expected, part of this is war time propaganda from every country for justification of supporting the "good" guy
Also in the article wasn't mentioned intervention in Kazakhstan, behind-the-scenes FSB operations in Belarus, Montenegro etc., or simply acts of terrorism like Skrypal poisoning, or murder of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin, or dozens of similar acts around the world. It indicates that Putin is "adventuresome" and prone to risk-taking, even at the cost of worsening relationships with other countries who do not threaten him. Having nuclear weapons is certainly an additional factor of why he is so bold, coupled with masterful utilization of useful idiots in the West, both on the left and the right, who'll cry about escalation every time someone will threaten to respond in kind.
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