> > the war as a knock-on side effect of Covid
> This doesn't make sense since the war has been happening, at some intensity, since about 2014. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
> The decapitation offensive was an escalation in an already existing conflict. If anything triggered it I would say it was the failure of Russian influence ops in the US, and the roll up of their agents e.g. https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-us-fbi-deripaska-sanctions/32...
In the end its going to be a bunch of things, perhaps including the ones you noted. For example, I've read credible analysis suggesting that the Russian demographic implosion is a long-term driver: in a decade they may not have enough military age people to operate even their weak military and economy at the same time. That makes them vulnerable to India and China and, in their paranoid fantasies, Europe.
But re brexit, the rolling political weakness in the UK, and its severe lack of credibility in Europe, must have looked like it would help their more recent ambitions in Ukraine. I'm fairly confident that brexit will eventually be shown to be at least partly due to organised financing and political disinformation from the Russian state, and I'd be surprised if didn't fit onto some projected timelines in some ministry in Moscow.
> > If you’re in the UK and you’re hurting and you voted to Leave, you broke it and you bought it.
> Correct. Unfortunately the rest of us have to unbreak it somehow.
Yep.