A side-effect of blind rage is that it makes one blind. And a side effect of demonizing all things Russian is thinking that Putin must be mad. To this way of thinking, "Russia" and "Putin" are largely synonymous: Putin must be the only one with a brain while the other 144.1 million naturally skeptical Russians, 83% of whom nevertheless approve of Putin's job performance, must be just mindless drones.
Viewed through this prism, Putin's symptoms of mental illness are many and varied. Putin must be mad to invade the Ukraine because its military has been trained and equipped by NATO and will kill the invaders and counterattack while sanctions destroy the Russian economy within weeks. And when the small Russian force, which is 4 or 5 times smaller than the Ukrainian army, neutralizes it within weeks while the Russian economy keeps going as before, Putin must be mad because isolation from the EU will wreck the Russian economy... eventually... "When a crawfish whistles from a mountaintop" (когда рак на горé свиснет") is the Russian expression that typically applies to such situations.
At the risk of restating the obvious, let me enumerate the actual reasons.
Why did Russia invade the Ukraine? To neutralize multiple threats: of an otherwise inevitable eventual war with NATO; of genocide against Donetsk and Lugansk (which, based on recovered official documents, was being planned); of a bioterror attack using viruses and bacteria engineered in Ukrainian bioterror labs funded by Joe Biden's son Hunter (also copiously documented); and of dirty nukes the Ukrainians announced that they were planning to build with American help using Chernobyl's nuclear waste and to lob at Russia using their large stock of ballistic missiles.
Why did it take just a few weeks to neutralize the Ukrainian military? Because it was trained and equipped by NATO, an organization that exists for the purpose of funneling money to US defense contractors (who then use some of it to buy politicians who vote to give them even more money) and is only useful for attacking mostly defenseless countries such as Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria.
Why did the Russian economy not collapse because of Western sanctions? Because the Russians have been working on import replacement for the past eight years and are by now largely immune to sanctions in all of the key categories. In fact, they see the sanctions as a net positive because they provide the impetus for new economic development in areas such as passenger jet aircraft, pharmaceuticals, IT services and many others.
Finally, why do the Russians no longer care about being excluded by the West? Because the West is collapsing. I knew this for a long time; key figures in the Russian government most definitely know this; and now you know it too. About five years ago, living in the US, I watched the process pick up speed and moved, together with my family, back to Russia. I thought it only fair that my wife, who had lived through the Soviet collapse, would be spared having to live through the Western one.
And now the time scale on which to track the progression of Western collapse is not decades, and perhaps not even years, but months! This also explains the hurry with which Russia has worked to reunite the historically triune Eastern Slavic nation of Russians, Belorussians and Malorussians before shutting the figurative "window to Europe" that Peter the Great had opened three centuries ago, moving Russia's capital from Moscow to St. Petersburg.
Having had a foot in each camp for a long time now, I doubt that I will find straddling the Great Wall of Russia all that comfortable. But I am up to the challenge, and I hope that you are too. No, Putin is not mad. The Russians are with him, and they want nothing short of victory. This isn't poetry; this is math. Oh, and the West is collapsing; but you already knew that, right?
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