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All the Putin jokes aside, I don't think he's doing it for geopolitical or treasonous reasons. I think it's mainly just a by-product of his style of interaction and competition, which exists for very logical ("logical") reasons and which he's been able to make work pretty well for himself.
https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-weak-strongman
Snyder says it better than I can, but basically, he is weak and stupid, but he needs to be able to dominate people around him, and so his whole strategy is to attack and weaken, because that's his only way to be able to compete effectively. He can usually dominate the weakened version of whatever he's attacking, in a way he never could if it was at full strength. It's why he shows such innate and passionate violence against anything or anyone that is organized, effective, or popular: Because someday, they might turn against him, and if they did they would definitely win, and so he has to Nancy Kerrigan them before they get a chance.
Again Snyder summarizes it better, but it is also the exact same model that Putin uses, and it's had exactly the same effect on Russia (taking it from at least a regional powerhouse and functioning country that could accomplish significant things, to being a pariah state that barely functions in the first place even internally.) The strategy only works for as long as there is no one "outside the wall" who can come into the sphere of influence in un-weakened form, and if that ever happens, then the strongman crumbles instantly into impotent rubble. To ever let one of these people get control of your country or organization is basically just a nonstop rolling catastrophe that just gets worse and worse the longer they hold on to power.
Say what you want about Putin but he has been pretty successful in getting Russia back into the global game after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now he's mostly doing this by dragging everyone else down so your average Russian is gaining exactly zilch from any of this, but when you look at the state of democracy all over the West you can't say he reduced Russia's international influence.
Back into the global game?
They collapsed from being a global superpower, to selling off their natural resources to enrich a couple of hundred of the worst people on the planet, and beating up their neighbors for oil money and mostly being ignored by most of the rest of the world unless there's an Olympics or something. Putin didn't cause all of that of course, but he had a huge amount to do with entrenching the systems of corruption that doomed any chance they would have had of recovering their superpower status as China or Europe did after major catastrophes happened to them.
And now, as of the last few years, they can't even beat up their neighbors anymore. Sure, they still have a huge impact on the world stage in the form of destabilizing foreign democracies. You're not wrong about that part. But that's another example of my point: The whole shtick is just weakening everyone else. It won't do anything at all to increase their military power, increase standards of living for either oligarchs or common people. It won't help them win any of those regional wars. And it definitely won't help them against any threat that comes from "outside the sphere" (bird flu or climate change or whatever). It's just more Tanya Harding shit.