Learned behavior. He took Crimea without firing a shot. Took Georgia and it didn’t even make the 6 o’clock news. Slowly expanded his empire while the West was preoccupied with Iraq and Afghanistan.
Even up until the tanks started rolling in did Europe not even consider the possibility of invasion to be real. Just last Monday was the Ukrainian President asking for calm and not to overreact.
Yes. I think there was also a severe miscalculation how the invasion would be internationally received. Putin has been extremely successful at distracting and dividing the western world with troll farms and reactionary political movements. But violating long respected international law with an overt invasion cannot be postmodernly relativized away. And Russia going back to doing exactly what Soviet Russia did - subjugate and impoverish client states to implement crony totalitarianism - inflames a lot of cultural memories. The modern world makes the contrast even starker - at least the European countries behind the Iron Curtain had been liberated from Nazi Germany with Soviet Starvation being a step up. This is a direct attack on a modernizing democracy to drag it backwards to the "good old days".
Even up until the tanks started rolling in did Europe not even consider the possibility of invasion to be real. Just last Monday was the Ukrainian President asking for calm and not to overreact.