They were heavily pro-Russian to start with. Strongly against the corrupted Ukrainian government & oligarchs, remembering the Odessa massacre during Maidan etc.
But they feel betrayed now – Putin seems to have lost all the goodwill there, the hearts of even those people.
- Crimea wants to control the canal from the Djnepr, which had been shut off by Ukraine.
- Russia wants the coast line to control more gas fields in the Black Sea. The U.S. of course also want to control them by proxy (see Burisma/Biden). Snake island also controls some of the fields.
- Rightly or wrongly, Russia is scared of NATO expansion.
I think it may be the case that the great Russian empire theory is a pretext that is put forward by Putin for his own population and eagerly taken up by the West for propaganda. Attacks on Kyiv (stalled) and Kharkiv could be diversions from the south. As noted above, the Kharkiv attack does not make sense though.
I don't see how any listed benefits would outweigh the costs of either option. It troubles me a lot, because Putin has seemed to me to be a carefully calculating player up until this. It makes me wonder if he has truly lost it. Or if there is some grand plan which this is only a small part of. Both are scary.
And, as an aside, I think COVID started for the exact same reason as what's portrayed in Chernobyl. Chinese model of governance is not that different. When accurate sober assessments of facts on the ground are needed and speed is of the essence, its ineffectiveness takes over. Once the genie is out of the bottle and there's nothing to hide from superiors, and once Beijing sends over some adults to whip things into shape, the sheer scale of China's economy allows it to power through and suppress the crisis using draconian means. But for the first who knows how many weeks (certainly well before Jan 1 2020), it was much slower motion Chernobyl.