He's impressed by power, and believes that displays of impressive power differentials grant legitimacy to leadership ex post facto.
So, he's got to keep ramping up the power moves, by the nature of his own rule system. Those moves took him from Chechnya to Georgia to Eastern Ukraine and now the perception fed to him (captured intel) was that he could finally submit all of Ukraine in 3 days. The FSB leader who fed him that information, Beseda, is now in deep trouble and under arrest.
A huge problem for him is that you should perceive the opponent's power before planning your moves. There's a lot that goes into the perception of power. It's an art form by itself. FSB have (according to leaks) direct access to these arts. They have models, disciplines, etc. But according to them they are forbidden in their use by politics. Putin's internal power system blocks this work.
So this was a huge setup for the issues we see now--Putin doesn't really understand the value of intelligence as "new things that must be constantly perceived, ordered, presented, and understood"; he understands power at a superficial level of "effects yielded by moves," like in Judo, chess, etc. For this reason he has to start the game in order to learn it, again and again. He can't predict very well by nature of his psychology and the system he has created around him.
He's allowed himself to be perceptually blinded, while being a strong tactician.
Therefore you get these moves that make people ask..."why?" Because he sees a different situation due to his broken perceptual system.
Still, he does understand the game once it's gone wrong and the sides have had their first moves. He learns from losses, that's a huge lesson from the arts he has studied himself. So now he's got a chance to show off his next-phase tactics.
The best way for his opponents to take advantage of his newly-alerted status would be to open a united front with pseudo-random tactics (you can't play his game, or any known game--you must invent multiple new games that are foreign to him) combined with a hyper-tactical, hyper-executive mindset. Frequent direct and somewhat strange requests must be made of him. This will overpower his personal perceptive system on an ongoing basis so that his own tactics seem nonsensical to even him. He'll become exhausted and withdraw.
Unfortunately Europe and the west struggle with this style of thinking, so the situation will be awkward for some time longer IMO. In the meantime it is a phenomenal opportunity to make new and lasting HUMINT contacts in any country east of Poland.