[lomereiter]

My wild guess is that Putin's goal has always been cleansing the power circles of the oligarchs who got there in the 1990s, and now that he's running out of time as he's getting old, he needs help in that from the West. Now he might be betting that the sanctions will mostly target these oligarchs and make the country _really_ unattractive for them, whereas an average Russian anyway has no assets abroad and doesn't travel much, and therefore won't notice the difference, as energy and food are abundant domestically. If that's his plan, there should be no need to go beyond Ukraine.