"This is all Putin's own personal decision. Nobody other than Putin would have made it, not even Ramzan Kadyrov, had he had a say in it," Pavlovsky said, referring to the authoritarian ruler of Russia's Chechnya region. "Nobody, including myself, realized just how maniacally obsessed he must have been with Ukraine. We underestimated the extent of decay of the Russian government."
Link: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-ukraine-invasion-putin-trap-pavlovsky/31787269.html