If Ukraine had kept its nuclear weapons it would not have been attacked, but there was never any risk of Russia using nuclear weapons.
This is just one of many many ways that people in the west fundamentally misunderstand Russia, and why so many people made fools of themselves thinking that Putin would not invade. The other really big one is that Russia never admitted that it lost the Cold War and thinks the war is still going on, and that it's the fault of the US and others that Russia is so backwards and poor, not a result of their own mismanagement, the weakness of their people, and the general corruption.
With Russia it's precisely because of their fundamentals. Too much depends on the people in charge, because Russia never developed effective institutions to constrain their leaders. When they have a good leader, they take a step forward, and when they have a bad leader, they take three steps backward. Bad leaders are always more effective, because it's easier to make things worse.
Medieval Russia was not too different from the rest of Europe, with all the little monarchies and merchant republics. The period of centralization that followed was also similar. But the accidents of history almost all went the same way. Monarchies defeating merchant republics and free cities. Muscovy being too good at conquering its neighbors, turning Russia into a huge centralized empire with little direct competition. The assassination of Alexander II before he could complete his reforms. The unholy mess of 1917–1922. The idealism of Gorbachev and Yeltsin that turned their reforms into a disaster.
Because their institutions are completely corrupt. There are no rules to the game so the powerful take everything. It is a smaller pie but if I can have it all, why do I care?
Prosperity correlates with powerful institutions (not necessarily democratic). But ultimately you need a set of rules that even the state has to follow.
It's ultimately a cultural issue. Russia never really experienced the liberalization and philosophical transformation of the enlightenment that occurred in Europe, they practiced monstrous feudalism until suddenly transitioning to socialism, which quickly became just as monstrous. Rules without ideology or philosophy are just things to be gamed - exactly as occurs often in those cultures without strong rule-of-law ideologies and societal game-theory countermeasures against corruption and malfeasance. Our politicians would rather twist the laws to make corruption legal than engage in illegal corruption because the drawbacks of illegality are so large. Russian politicians would rather do things extralegally because the system is facade and the real system is one of might makes right so the laws don't apply to them.
A lot of it is because transportation is quite difficult. Even today huge tracts in Russia are without any roads. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the US, where even before the railroad and the automobile, transportation was quite easy, with navigable rivers flowing through the best farmland in the world.
Another big piece is how easy it is to invade; how hard it is to defend. History records 50 invasions of Russia. For centuries Russian looked in envy at the very fertile land in what is now Southern Russia and Eastern Ukraine, but dared not farm it because it was swept regularly by quite fierce nomads on horses. That farmland became secure enough to farm only about 250 years ago.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is Great Britain, which has been successfully invaded, but not after Britain got serious (about 4 centuries ago?) about having a good navy. When the risk of the investment's being destroyed by an invading army is low, more investment happens. And a navy profits more than an army does from technological investment: 100 years before Britain's industrial revolution, London was investing heavily in copper mining and copper refining so that it could give all of its warships a copper bottom.
The US is even more secure than Great Britain because any great power or middle power contemplating an invasion of the US would need to cross either the Atlantic or the Pacific to start the attack. (Yes, the invader could try to get Mexico to agree to host the invading army, but the US would probably find out about that plan and respond by either blockading Mexico or invading it if it doesn't immediately abandon the plan.)
Policies that work great for secure countries like the US and Britain work terribly for countries like Russia, China, Iraq or Iran that must always worry about a land invasion. The basic strategy the US and the UK used in WWII had been worked out by Britain during the Napoleonic wars. Japan and Australia can follow the same basic strategy. Russia cannot because except for a few heady decades during the Soviet Union and maybe in the 1890s, the best way to increase Russian security was always to invest more in the army what with the country's being so hard to defend against a hostile army.
On the other hand, this doesn't explain why Poland, which was even wiped off the maps for a few times, has a GDP per capita almost twice of Russia, which wasn't really invaded much throughout more-or-less-recent history (au contrary).
Russia has paid an economic cost (from e.g. sanctions) for invading UKR. In the year before the invasion, the ratio of Polish GDP per cap to Russian was only 142%. (Also in that year, Polish GDP per cap differed from the GDP per cap of the entire Warsaw-Pact region by only $200.)
I think a country like Russia is still influenced by its experience centuries ago (when it was invaded for a time every single year) and by its experience in WWII. One can argue that (because of nukes and because satellite recon and cheap drones give a tech advantage to the defender) Russia is in a new situation where it can relax and start worrying much less about invasions, but I think that even if the leaders of a country realized that, it would be hard for them to actually change the country. I think for example a big reason that the US is so rich is that (for the white settlers) life in America was always easy. The economy has changed drastically since Colonial American times, when most adults were farmers, but the experience of plentiful high-quality farmland (especially when the settlers started crossing into the Ohio Valley) and plentiful timber and rivers that were a great help to transportation even without doing much work to improve the river system (by adding canals for example) produced a culture that remained adaptive and useful even as the economy was transformed by steam, railroads, the telegraph, cars, electricity, etc.
Germany for example introduced a welfare system in 1871 IIRC. For the average commoner to make a living in Germany was hard enough that the German government of that time (who cannot be accused of having been bleeding hearts) considered it essential to national security for the government to help the commoner out. In contrast, when (many decades after Germany introduced welfare) the Dust Bowl devastated large regions of the US in the 1930s, there were no governmental programs to assist them because most Americans and most American decisionmakers considered such programs to be largely unnecessary.
I believe these governing traditions in the US (which started to change in the 1930s with the election of FDR, who transformed the country more than any previous president except maybe Lincoln) of small-government and individual freedom were conducive to wealth generation whereas the Russian governing tradition where a powerful state is seen as essential to protecting the nation from invasions and where the population tends to depend heavily on the government for its economic security tends to keep a country poor. And again I hypothesize that these governing traditions are difficult to change.
And maybe the reason Poland never develop a strong national-security culture like Russia did is that it was in a hopeless situation with respect to invasions and such (except during the ascendancy of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, but I don't think that coalition lasted long) because it was surrounded by more populous, more-cohesive neighbors and did not have much in the way of mountains or bodies of water to slow down invasions from those neighbors: namely, France, Germany, the Austrian empire and Russia. In fact, I believe even Sweden invaded Poland at one point (although it had to cross the Baltic Sea to do so). No matter how much the government of Poland invested in national security, it wouldn't have been enough to move the needle much.
In contrast, Russia was a big enough country with enough natural resources (e.g., good farm land, timber) that if it tried really hard over a span of decades, it usually could increase its national security considerably, which led to a national culture that emphasizes a powerful state with a powerful army (and a powerful spy system to suppress uprisings by already-conquered ethnic minorities).
Also, it is in the national interest of the US to prevent Russian re-expansion westward, and between 1989 and 2022 its main two allies in this regard were Poland and Romania (with NATO taking a secondary role), so after 1989 Poland could feel secure (at least till Trump came to power) without having to spend much on defense whereas Russia has felt (and still feels) that they are 100% responsible for their own national security.
Poland threw off the Soviet corruption far faster than Ukraine has, and Russia has just accelerated the corruption and made it worse.
Which is why the current Paypal Mafia obsession with inflicting the US with Russia-style oligarchy and corruption should be so terrifying to anybody in Silicon Valley that isn't already a billionaire: it will crater the future of the US as leading market for developing new tech, and hand it all over to China, to the extent that China wants to be the home to new tech.
Too much centralized power at the top destroys economic growth, whether it's officially a socialist one, or merely a corrupt one, or just unchecked capitalism where disruption has been squashed by those at the top.
> (Yes, the invader could try to get Mexico to agree to host the invading army, but the US would probably find out about that plan and respond by either blockading Mexico or invading it if it doesn't immediately abandon the plan.)
Curious, how viable would this strategy be when invading via Canada?
Brain drain at an unimaginable scale, which is a self-reinforcing mechanism because once it starts, governments will usually impose restrictions to try to stop it, which makes everyone else want to leave too.
They'd be quite well off just now if they'd taken the resources spent invading Ukraine and spent them on developing their own country instead. Why they feel the need to keep invading everyone is a more interesting question.
The troops are Ukrainian on one side and Russian plus North Korean on the other. The fact both countries have supporters even if only a handful in Russia's case doesn't make them very at war.
This is just one of many many ways that people in the west fundamentally misunderstand Russia, and why so many people made fools of themselves thinking that Putin would not invade. The other really big one is that Russia never admitted that it lost the Cold War and thinks the war is still going on, and that it's the fault of the US and others that Russia is so backwards and poor, not a result of their own mismanagement, the weakness of their people, and the general corruption.