Note: I am from Brazil, and live nowhere near Russia.

That said... I believe Russia see the invasion on Ukraine as a necessity to block Ukraine from joining NATO.

A lot of people thinking Russia wants to just conquer Ukraine risk a massive escalation.

Ukraine did a lot of things that pissed Russia off after it started to get closer ties to USA...

Among them:

1. Ban on Russian Language

2. Threatening to close Sevastapol base (before Russia claimed Crimea back)

3. Accepting Azov battalion as part of the official army.

4. Allowing army members use SS symbols on their uniform (to be more specific, Galizen)

and so on.

But the most important one was: Adding in the constitution that they will join NATO, and accepting billions in military aid from USA (yes, USA was pumping a ton of weapons in Ukraine BEFORE the war, USA itself said so!)

Ukraine joining NATO is a risk Russia can't take, yes NATO is defensive but Russia has beef with NATO members already, if Ukraine joins NATO for example it becomes way riskier for Russia to defend Armenia as ally if Turkey attacks them for example, and there is the fact NATO members been actually on the offensive a couple times now, and the whole NATO bombed the shit out of Serbia officially in the past (Russia was helping Serbia in that conflict)

So why I said this risk massive escalation?

Well, if you understand your enemy wrong you will make wrong decisions.

Russia doesn't want to conquer Ukraine, they want to keep NATO away from that border, and there are two ways of doing that:

1. Convince Ukraine to not join NATO (what they are trying to do now).

2. Just bomb Ukraine until there is nothing left to join NATO in first place.

A lot of people are thinking Russia won't try the second option because they want to conquer Ukraine, they are wrong about this, Russia knows very well they don't have right now the capability to conquer Ukraine, the only rational decision to go about this is try a "diplomatic" victory, and if that fails, then the real "War" comes (I suspect this is why Russia don't call this a war yet), where Russia will finally use all their equipment, including a large amount of strategic bombers and intermediate range missiles to utterly destroy everything in Ukraine, this way they don't have to bother with occupation and will still win regardless of how much NATO weapons are inside Ukraine (in fact the more NATO fills Ukraine with weapons, the bigger target it becomes for indiscriminate destruction, when else Russia will have opportunity to wipe out all the equipment of enemies like that?)

EDIT: I hope all downvotes aren't because people are believing I am wrong in claiming Russia WILL flatten Ukraine if they feel the need to do so and support more war...