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My 2c, IANA international relations specialist, worth what you paid for this.
2 main root causes: Putin sees himself as the guy who is going to re-establish the Russian Empire, and Putin has been so powerful for so long that he's now a real actual tyrant.
The first bit explains why he has invaded Ukraine and the second explains why he thinks he can.
One of the reasons why he's done it now is that the USA is not what it was. It's confused, tribal, and weak. Yes, that's partly because Putin has been making it that way by manipulating social media and running disinformation campaigns for decades, but anyone who has ever studied the history of Russia knows that's standard operating procedure. It's a tactic invented by Tsarist state security during the Empire that Putin's trying to rebuild.
Another reason that Putin sees weakness right now in relation to the thing that Putin is doing right now, a thing that Putin would be happy to continue doing without American interference, is the Biden family's strange entanglement in the energy industry in the country that he's invading.
The only reason that Hunter Biden, a talentless crack addict with no apparent qualifications or skills other than the ability to fuck hookers on camera, got a powerful seat on the board of a privately-owned Ukrainian energy company was because his father was the Vice President of the United States and the Obama administration's main spokesman on US-Ukrainian affairs. That's corruption.
When that talentless crack addict's father becomes the Commander-in-Chief of the forces that can, if they choose to, stop the invasion of the country that the Bidens have this strange corrupt entanglement in, that's weakness.
When it transpires that details of the ways that the talentless crack addict influenced his father were deliberately silenced in order to protect the father's presidential ambitions, and the half of the US political community that has gone insane gets proven right about something, that's weakness.
The laptop story is so fucking implausible and so perfect for Russia that Russia must have made it happen. There is just no way that was an accident. This is what Russia does and has always done.
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