What if that assumption no longer holds, though? The New York Times asks that question in light of Putin’s unmatched isolation among world leaders during the COVID-19 pandemic and wonder if he’s snapped. In part, that question arises because no one sees a rational benefit to Russia from a ground invasion of Ukraine:

In Moscow, many analysts remain convinced that the Russian president is essentially rational, and that the risks of invading Ukraine would be so great that his huge troop buildup makes sense only as a very convincing bluff. But some also leave the door open to the idea that he has fundamentally changed amid the pandemic, a shift that may have left him more paranoid, more aggrieved and more reckless.

The 20-foot-long table that Mr. Putin has used to socially distance himself this month from European leaders flying in for crisis talks symbolizes, to some longtime observers, his detachment from the rest of the world. For almost two years, Mr. Putin has ensconced himself in a virus-free cocoon unlike that of any Western leader, with state television showing him holding most key meetings by teleconference alone in a room and keeping even his own ministers at a distance on the rare occasions that he summons them in person.

Speculation over a leader’s mental state is always fraught, but as Mr. Putin’s momentous decision approaches, Moscow commentators puzzling over what he might do next in Ukraine are finding some degree of armchair psychology hard to avoid.

“There’s this impression of irritation, of a lack of interest, of an unwillingness to delve into anything new,” Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist and former member of Mr. Putin’s human rights council, said of the president’s recent public appearances. “The public is being shown that he has been in practical isolation, with ever fewer breaks, since the spring of 2020.”

Let’s stretch that out a bit in another potentially chilling direction, too. The issue might not be pandemic isolation but the long hold on nearly dictatorial power. Such dictators/presidents-for-life/Dear Leaders develop megalomania over the period of their control. In fact, it might even be inevitable, given the nature of that kind of power and control. We see it repeatedly in such leaders whether they be arch-ghouls of history like Stalin and Hitler, Qaddafi and Saddam, or fools like Ceaucescu and Mussolini. Most of these erred in fighting wars that rationally they should have avoided and really had no business starting in the first place, and in most of those cases, that led to their downfall.

In other words, maybe we should have expected a similar erosion in Putin all along.

On the other hand, Putin has played this pretty coyly so far, and others think that Putin just wants to sell the bluff. If so, he’s getting a lot of help from the US, one expert tells the NYT, but even that might end up backfiring:

“Starting a full-scale war is completely not in Putin’s interest,” said Anastasia Likhacheva, the dean of world economy and international affairs at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. “It is very difficult for me to find any rational explanation for a desire to carry out such a campaign.”

Even if Mr. Putin were able to take control of Ukraine, she noted, such a war would accomplish the opposite of what the president says he wants: rolling back the NATO presence in Eastern Europe. In the case of a war, the NATO allies would be “more unified than ever,” Ms. Likhacheva said, and they would be likely to deploy powerful new weaponry along Russia’s western frontiers. …

Fyodor Lukyanov, a prominent Moscow foreign policy analyst who advises the Kremlin, said Mr. Putin’s goal now was “to force the outcome of the Cold War to be partially revised.” But he still believes Mr. Putin will stop short of full-scale invasion, instead using “special, asymmetric or hybrid means” — including making the West believe that he is truly prepared to attack.

“A bluff has to be very convincing,” Mr. Lukyanov said. And the United States, he went on, with its robust portrayals of an aggressive Russia poised for invasion, “is playing along at 200 percent.”

In other words, a little foaming at the mouth could help sell the bit and get Putin some concessions. He’s insisting that NATO withdraw to its pre-2017 positions and pull troops out of the Baltic states, a demand which he knows is a non-starter. He might be bought off by removing our anti-missile systems from Poland and a repeal of the 2008 Bucharest Declaration that pledged NATO membership to Ukraine and Georgia, a particularly dumb move at the time.

In fact, diplomats Daniel Fried and Kurt Volker remind us how stupid that move was in today’s Politico Magazine. Fifteen months before the May 2008 adoption of the Bucharest Declaration, Vladimir Putin made clear that he would no longer work with Europe in cooperative engagement while the US pushed NATO expansion and a unipolar world:

On Friday, as for the past 58 years, foreign policy leaders will convene at the Munich Security Conference to address challenges to the transatlantic community.

The man who will be the single biggest topic of conversation at this year’s conference won’t be in attendance. But 15 years ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin used the gathering to issue a broadside that definitively rejected the European security order many in his audience had spent years trying to build. In February 2007, Putin stood in Munich’s Bayerischer Hof for 30 minutes and accused the United States of creating a unipolar world “in which there is one master, one sovereign.” He added, “at the end of the day this is pernicious.”

It wasn’t really Putin’s excoriation of the United States for hypocrisy after its invasion of Iraq that was notable; this was pretty much mainstream German, French, and much American thinking. The real moment of revelation was his broader conclusion that the U.S.-led liberal order, a.k.a. the Free World, was of no interest or value to Russia.

Putin’s speech came as a shock to those who had invested substantial effort in working with Russia to include it in a post-Cold War global stability system – and, at the time, still believed this was possible. A decade and a half later, a massive Russian military build-up in and around Ukraine is capable of striking at any moment. We should not now be surprised or confused. He made clear his intentions already in 2007.

What is more surprising is how the U.S. and Europe, despite Putin’s obvious warning in Munich and Russia’s many actions over 15 years, have nonetheless clung to the notion that we can somehow work together with Putin’s Russia on a strategic level. It is finally time for the West to face facts. Whether or not Putin launches a major new invasion of Ukraine, he has rejected the post-Cold War European security architecture and means it. He is on a deliberate and dedicated path to build a greater Russia, an empire where the Soviet Union once stood.

In that sense, Putin has not just been rational all along, he’s been thoroughly predictable. If a former KGB colonel elbowing his way to power and reorganizing the oligarchy to consolidate his hold didn’t give the West a clue to his imperial ambitions, the 2008 invasion of Georgia should have pierced through the fantasy thinking about Russia as a security partner. The seizure of Crimea and the occupation-by-proxy of the Donbas in 2014 should also have forced the scales from the eyes of the West. And let’s not forget all of the poisonings and window falls of Putin’s enemies over the years, either.

It’s still worth wondering if the pandemic or megalomania, or both, could be driving Putin now. A full-scale invasion will destabilize Russia while stabilizing a previously fractious NATO and force Moscow back into economic wars it cannot win. Such a move would be convincing evidence that Putin has tipped over in a dramatic and dangerous manner. But the anticipation of that outcome makes for a very ruthless chit for a coldly rational bluff, too. I guess we’ll know which is it when we see the ultimate direction of all those Russian ground forces.