tanbogy's comments

And I used to get angry with 250ms ping playing WoW.

It's easy to just call it Putin's whim but from a strategic point of view and to help see stuff like this in the future is probably worth at least reviewing some issues from the Russian point of view.

A few things that contribute to Russian goals here:

A. "paypack" for the overthrow of the long standing pro Russian Ukrainian government in 2013. Putin would like the status quo returned to 2012 - weak buffer state reliant on Russia (Belarus 2.0)

B. historical significance of Ukraine joining the old western cold war army (nato) would be devastating. Russia may have calculated this is the last chance to stop that or at least delay it for a generation

C. finish the 2014 war. Get the land bridge to Crimea and unify the Russian speaking west and south western Ukrainian regions (imho this is goal number 1 since it give massive economic and political benefits.)

There's probably loads of other goals, but they are the first to come to mind.

Note: I'm not agreeing with any of them, just pointing out they are likely there and we would probably be aware of them.