You do know you are trying to apply this logic to Putin......so yes, I believe he just invaded to see the response which was weak by the West and did it again 8 years later to a larger scale after building his military army from selling 100s of billion USD of resources to the EU. Then took advantage of the world starting to recovery from COVID-19 and EU's reliance on Russian energy which was built in the last 8 years with the expansion of the gas pipeline project.