Strategy and narrative are not the same thing. I talked about my options regarding narrative vs reality in my other comments.

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.