Ukraine has fended off Russian attacks on its sovereignty over the years and grown in its resolve as a nation – a process that went largely unnoticed by Putin and his inner circle of advisors. Putin had told a European official in September 2014 that he could “take Kyiv in two weeks,” and had evidently maintained the same outlook since invading Ukraine in 2014 despite his military failures that year. Putin misattributed Kyiv’s unwillingness to yield to Russia to a small group of Ukrainian politicians controlled by the West (which the Kremlin usually refers to as ‘the Kyiv regime’) rather than to the growing self-determination of the Ukrainian people to remain a nation–a determination ironically driven in part by the Russian 2014 invasion and continued pressure. Putin’s propaganda in the lead-up to the invasion reveals that he and his ideologues lived in an echo chamber dominated by an alternate reality in which Ukrainians would welcome the Russian forces liberating them from the supposed oppression of the ”Kyiv regime.”

https://kyivindependent.com/opinion-weakness-is-lethal-why-putin-invaded-ukraine-and-how-the-war-must-end/