Political Memes

It seems like we always slippery-sloped this conflict from the beginning. If Russia is given a square millimetre of land, then they'll demand all of Ukraine, Poland, and for good measure, North Carolina, and of course kill everyone there.

Let's look at this from a different perspective.

Putin has a need to posture and project power. Most autocrats do, and especially in a country that's otherwise stagnant. Russia can hardly point to a robust economy or major international stage presence in the last few decades, and the continuing encroachment of institutions like NATO and the EU in his backyard just make them look even more impotent and irrelevant.

That's why the Donbass was such a great target, if you look at it from a marketing perspective: it lets him say "We're important! We're powerful! We still have a sphere of influence!", and wrap it in an appealing (to a domestic audience) story of "We're reuniting a community of fellow Russophones, who have been repressed by a country that didn't get the memo that slapping the Black Sun on every surface isn't the best PR choice ever". It promised a cheap win that 's full of the exact symbolism he's after.

From that perspective, it might have spiraled into a "we have to conquer/control all of Ukraine" situation because anything but a full formal surrender will be a military and political hairball to enforce. But does they even want that? It's way more difficult and expensive, and presents a much less compelling story to rally the public behind; you have to really try to force the "de-Nazification" angle to try to make it remotely look palatable.

If we reconceptualize the situation as "what's the cheapest way to let Putin walk away with the win he actually craves", that might have been simply putting on a big stage act and saying "uwu you're so big and strong, we can't possibly stand up to your mighty military, here's a token concession, please let us live, and can we have a treaty of mutual friendship because we like you so much more than those weak EU people?" He gets the street cred he craves at home, and overall bloodshed is minimized. Yes, it's still incentivizing a bully to be a bully, but generally people prefer that to being dead.