It was the only move they could make given the circumstances. The question isn't whether it was the right move, it's whether it was the right time.
Some would argue it should have happened much earlier. They delayed too long and let the problem fester and get much worse than it could have been if they had intervened more forcefully earlier.
Then again the counter-argument to that, which i think is valid, is that Russia's economy was not yet ready to withstand the sanctions assault, and it took time to prepare and put all the defenses into place so to speak.
Why was it the only move they could make?
Also, how valid is the counter argument that you mentioned? Do you think that if Russia would have done it earlier even with a less prepared economy for sanctions, it would have been better overall?
What else could they do? After trying for eight years to negotiate with the West a solution for the civil war in Ukraine and for a rethinking of the security architecture in Europe in a way that doesn't existentially threaten Russia with NATO missile systems on its largest and most vulnerable border? What could they do after warning the West for twenty plus years to stop expanding NATO as that expansion threatens to destabilize the entire European security situation? What else could they do when NATO by 2022 had built up a huge army in Ukraine poised to invade the Donbass republics and unleash Kiev's Nazis to cause a bloodbath, seeking revenge upon the rebels who resisted them for eight years? What could they do when the Kiev regime states it would ethnically cleanse millions of Russians from their homes? When the Kiev regime openly and repeatedly announces its intent to conquer Crimea next after subduing the Donbass? What could they do when Zelensky goes to the Munich security conference and announces that his Nazi regime intends to acquire nuclear weapons and the collective West just sits there and applauds?
As for your second question, i honestly don't know. And i don't think the Russians knew for sure either. That is the kind of thing that you can only really know once you try it. Militarily it would definitely have been easier. Economically however... The Russians themselves were surprised at how well their economy withstood these post 2022 sanctions. I think they fully expected to take a much bigger hit even after all of the preparations they had made. But they were ready to accept that hit because by 2022 they had no other choice. I don't know how politically viable would it have been to go into a full scale economic war with the West with the much weaker economic situation eight years prior, a situation in which they were still heavily dependent on the West. Would their population have accepted to bear the economic crisis if they weren't yet convinced that their government had tried every other possible solution to resolve the problem diplomatically? Or would that have played right into the hands of the West causing mass discontent and a fall of the government?
There is something that I wonder though. If Russia wanted to protect their borders so much, why they did allow Finland and Sweden to join NATO?
I'm not an expert on these kinds of military questions and i'm sure someone with more knowledge of how the Russian military establishment sees the situation could give a more qualified answer but here's my understanding at the moment:
It is a well known fact that both Sweden and Finland were already de facto integrated into NATO for a long time before they officially joined. Their accession was a formality that actually simplified Russian defensive planning in the Leningrad military district.
In practical terms Sweden joining is pretty meaningless as it poses no threat to Russia. And due to geography the Finish border is a much more defensible one than the Ukrainian one, plus Finland itself is kind of a nothing burger in terms of military capabilities.
Finland is a very sparsely populated country whose main population clusters are all concentrated on the southern coast, easy for Russia to reach, and it's not much of an industrial powerhouse either. Nothing compared to the military potential of Ukraine, whose army prior to 2022 had grown to massive proportions and still had huge stocks of Soviet armament, and, had it not been ruined by three decades of kleptocratic corruption, a large industrial, technological and military-industrial base inherited from the Soviet Union. Now Ukraine has been mostly demilitarized (minus the NATO drip feed that keeps them on life support) but before it was a real problem.
And though i'm sure that Russia would have preferred that both Finland and Sweden stay neutral - after all Russia had good relations with neutral Finland for many decades, and additional NATO military installations in Finland will require some reorientation and strengthening of the forces in that direction to counter NATO deployments - it's not nearly as big of a threat as a NATO Ukraine would have been.
But most importantly Finland is not and was not engaged in bombing ethnic Russians or building up an army to invade Russian territory. In short Ukraine is a vital interest to Russia, Finland is not, and Sweden just doesn't matter at all.
We will never know. I do think eventually Ukraine+NATO would've pulled a military invasion, so i think it was the correct move by Russia to stop them before it happened.
A perspective that I've personally come to adopt is to dialectically consider the Ukraine conflict through the lens of a "Soviet or post-Soviet civil war." This assessment acknowledges, for one, that the ongoing conflict is embedded within the broader paradigm of the Cold War, which has persisted since 1945, experiencing periods of (what can now be seen as) mere "detente" in the 1990s and 2000s. Much like the extended decade long pauses seen in the historical "Hundred Year's War" did not prevent that from being classified as "one" war, I believe future historical assessments may categorize the contemporary period as a continuation of a singular Cold War narrative, rather than distinct "old" and "new" Cold Wars as commonly discussed today.
The significance of this perspective is that it once again reinforces the sheer catastrophe that is the collapse of the USSR, a perpetually relevant historical lesson for all surviving AES states and MLs today. I distinctly remember that, back when the conflict escalated in 2022, there was a post on r/genzedong (which I can no longer find) that showcased street interviews of people in Moscow during (likely) the failed August 1991 intervention where one interviewee in the video presciently predicted there would be conflict between the newly separated nation states of Russia and Ukraine over Crimea.
In such a sense, the fact that there is now a Russo-Ukrainian conflict at all and to have it develop into a proxy war by NATO is the, in full frankness, undeniable victory of US hegemony within the macroscopic historical perspective. This is near entirely forgotten these days, but during the 20th century phase of the Cold War, it seemed inevitable that a NATO-Russia conflict would break out. This was not meant to be in Ukraine, of course, but Germany and specifically over Berlin. NATO has moved this war that was supposedly bound to occur in the middle of Europe all the way into the heartland of the USSR, furthermore subverting the former Warsaw Pact countries into its most fervent belligerents.
This US achievement must be recognized as it highlights that this is Russia's defeat in the sense that its leaders since Khrushchev have failed to appreciate the unchangingly permanent material conditions underlying US-NATO antagonism towards the pole of regional power which the USSR and Russia represents. Their utter idealism led to fantasies that such antagonism could be massaged or overcome through "peaceful coexistence" and then outright capitulation. Through this, the clash between the two was ultimately merely moved a thousand miles eastward and the immense scale of the Soviet surrender just buying two decades of detente as NATO swallowed up the former socialist states between West Germany and Moscow.
However, this does not mean that the escalation of the Ukraine conflict itself by Russia in 2022 is some geopolitical victory for US hegemony, however, rather than a colossal blunder by the geopolitically mediocre benchwarmer Biden presidency. To put it metaphorically, this is akin to having scammed someone of their own house and property and just as you were about to scam them of the very last clothes off their back, they finally wise up and sock you in the jaw. Yes, you still managed to take their house from them, but they ideally weren't supposed to wise up at all nor give you a distracting broken jaw right before you were planning to move on and pick that next fight across the city in the Asian neighborhood.
