[sharikous]

You are perfectly right.

And yet the swiftness of that move made that a fait accompli pretty quickly so people forget that.

A better line would be "before the 2022 invasion ..."

[TremendousJudge]

It's probably what the Russian government expected this time around as well -- if they had taken Ukraine in less than a week (as they apparently expected to), the negative European reaction probably wouldn't have happened, same as in 2014.