The oddest thing about Putin's invasion is that it would have been easier to pay off some military officer to stage a coup (maybe made easier by abducting Zelensky first), implement martial law, and hold sham elections with only Putin-approved candidates. So why didn't it happen?
Meaning military coup plus sham elections is the tried-and-true method for rapid regime change without having your own soldiers killed, which is always bad press.
Plus Ukraine has a large Russian population, and it was supposed to be full of corruption. And Zelensky was walking around in public. So you'd have thought it would be easy for the KGB I mean FSB to disappear him, and organize a pro-Russian military junta to take over.
There are 2 explanations: (1) the Ukraine military has become less corrupt and more cohesive since 2014, so FSB couldn't set up an effective coup, or (2) Putin deliberately wants to punish and destroy Ukraine visibly even if it makes his stated political goals *harder* to achieve
That is, a full-scale invasion is mass murder of civilians and his own soldiers carried out on live TV. Versus a surgical coup, that's only going to motivate the Ukrainian resistance, bring on Western support in munitions and sanctions, and generate opposition at home.
So either Putin found the Ukrainian military too professional to corrupt into a coup, which means he knew the invasion was going to cause thousands of deaths, or he purposely chose death and destruction make a public statement of revenge even at risk of his own failure.
Or he's just crazy and not thinking at all. So we have evil, grand evil, or craziness.
Per @McFaul (former US ambassador to Russia) it is indeed a different kind of thinking
https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/1497947482470322176
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