Re: "Putin may not be insane"
Naselus,
Russia's demands weren't just that Ukraine guarantee it wouldn't join NATO. They also wanted all NATO troops out of all countries that joined NATO after 1990 (I'm not sure if that also meant Polish troops out of Poland - or just all foreign ones), plus Ukraine to give back all weapons that it has received from NATO countries in the last few years and lose all future NATO support in training and equipping its army. Oh and to agree to Russia's interpretation of the Minsk accords - and that means allowing an election in Luhansk and Donbas while there were under Russian political and military control (so a rigged one) and then those newly "elected" officials to be included into the Ukrainian government with some sort of powers of veto so that they could stop Ukraine ever improving as a country and showing up how pisspoorly Putin has been running Russia.
Now given that Russia has invaded Ukraine 3 times since 2014 - disarming the Ukrainian army and giving up all hopes of re-arming it with modern weapons counts as a fucking stupid idea. As every time there was an internal disagreement in Ukriane's new devolved governing system, you can bet there'd have been Russian troops either on the border, or in the country.
That was not just normal great power muscle-flexing. It was Putin telling Ukraine that he wanted if not to run their government, to have an internal political veto and an external military one. For ever.
He never once deviated from those demands. There is now negotiation going on directly and via the Israeli government as mediators. I've seen a leak that the terms are in some ways worse, Ukriane would have to recognise Crimea and the independence of Luhansk and Donetsk (probably on the full province boundaries not what they'd been pushed back to before the war and cut it's army to 60,000 and promise not to join NATO. But in other ways they're actually better, because with the Donbas republics being recognised as independent - there's no political threat to Ukraine. And once Russian troops are out, they can break the terms of that deal any time and expand their army in 5 seconds flat, because they've got the trained personnel. So you do what Weimar Germany did after Versailles and you lose a bunch of privates, but keep the number of staff officers and NCOs to allow you to expand extremely quickly back up to full strength.
Given Putin also ought to be able to work that out, I'm sure there's some catch or misreporting from journalists being too optimistic - or he'll wait for them to surrender and then say, "Surprise! My army aren't pulling out after all!"
But anyway Putin's invasion of Ukraine was not "rational" in the sense that it's broken a bunch of his existing policies that were rational. For example, the way the French and Germans allowed him to negotiate and manipluate the Minsk accords gave him a crippling and permanent hold over Ukraine. France and Germany wouldn't support them, because they had political capital invested in their great diplomatic triumph, yet no Ukrainian government could implement Minsk, because Russia never honestly did the bits it was supposed to (like remove its troops) and no government could survive the disaster of allowing the Russian agents at the top of those governments into authority over Ukraine.
But as soon as Putin recognised the Republics as independent states, he voluntarily fucked up his own quite successful (if immoral, short-termist and dangerous) policy of the last ten years. Launching a full-scale invasion is even madder. He's buggered up his own economy, is taking massive military losses he wouldn't even have been able to afford to replace with the Russian economy at pre-sanctions-collapse levels. And what for? If he conquers Ukraine he's going to need hundreds of thousands of troops to hold it (the place is huge), and if he doesn't he's now lost his political leverage and fucked both his economy and his army.
US estimates are that Russia has lost about 5% of their initial equipment that they invaded with - something like 1,000 vehicles. Plus 4,000 killed (so you'd expect at least double that wounded enough to be out of action for a bit) Which is about 8% of the invasion force (150k-200k). That's in 2 weeks. And they haven't even launched a major assault into a big city yet. Even if they can unfuck their supply lines this is more than two thirds of the Russian army (and many of its best units) getting heavily damaged. They can replace the manpower, but the equipment is going to be expensive. Another two weeks of this and even if they win the war the Russian army will take a decade to recover. I doubt they can build new, but they can get some old Soviet kit out of mothballs and remanufacture it to more modern standards.
If it's rational, it's the fucking stupid end of the rationality scale.