Exactly. Russia had only bad choices. They tried to navigate them as best they could. With the benefit of hindsight it’s easy to see that the west was playing them all along with the Minsk agreements and such but even if they’d had known that making the move was incredibly dangerous and the more time spent preparing the better.

Russia’s hand was quite literally forced. Either stand up now at the last moment or be trod on for the next decade or more. Either way NATO would have won and that’s what people saying Putin made this worse don’t understand: the chessboard was already fixed. What Russia has pulled off instead we must be aware of is nothing short of a humiliation of NATO and the west so dire that they’ve nearly escalated to all out war against Russia and only Russian nukes prevent that. They have without intending to given hope to the global south, to anti-imperialist forces, to everyone who resists US/EU/NATO hegemony and that is worth more than a few more racist, reactionary Euro-nazi-lover nations officially joining NATO instead of maintaining a tactical neutrality.