Say I would like to believe something other than the "simple narrative"... then what is it, where is the actual strategy? All I see Putin doing last decade is alienating neighbors.
But yeah, I agree that pissing off your neighbors seems like a bad strategy. Though, if you look at recent history when Russia did the same thing to other neighboring countries like chechenya, Georgia, and Ukraine in 2014, Russia handily got away with this kind of aggression, so I don't think it's too unreasonable to think that Russian leaders bet they can do it again.