I do agree that in retrospect, the war doesn’t make much sense for Russia. As the article speculates, Putin must have thought that Ukraine was weak enough to be conquered in a matter of weeks, and that the west wouldn’t intervene, since it also didn’t intervene in the case of Crimea and Donbas.
Paper tiger, read about the West arms production currently and you’ll see every sober military analyst tells you they are in rags.