I do agree that in retrospect, the war doesn’t make much sense for Russia. As the article speculates, Putin must have thought that Ukraine was weak enough to be conquered in a matter of weeks, and that the west wouldn’t intervene, since it also didn’t intervene in the case of Crimea and Donbas.
I disagree with this. The west is clearly capable of continuous arms production, thanks to its large and stable imperialist supply chain. It is Russia’s economical potential which seems smaller in comparison.
Paper tiger, read about the West arms production currently and you’ll see every sober military analyst tells you they are in rags.