A piece of news I noticed recently, Igor “Strelkov” Girkin wants to go fight in Ukraine. He is currently siting in jail for extremism related charges. He was highly critical of the Russian government’s handling of the Ukraine question ever since 2014, and his Slavyansk anabasis. His attorney, Alexandr Molokhov says some unit that is fighting in Ukraine expressed its desire to enlist him. But the name of the unit has not been disclosed.
Strelkov is an idealist, he represents the hawkish forces in Russia and has been pissed at the Kremlin for not going full in in 2014.
Insomniac Resurrected 
Strictly speaking though, Strelkov was kinda right in a way. If Putin could’ve done something during a time when Ukraine didn’t have the entire civilized world’s government backing it, this would be a cake walk operation. Even though pragmatically speaking, it would be wiser to do it from 2015 to 2017 instead of 2014, as Russia would need to find a way to counter Obama’s sanctions. Perhaps Putin didn’t do it because he didn’t want to ruin all the chances at having a healthy relationship with US and EU. But we all have seen how it goes. Well, late is better than never.
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I cannot say if striking in 2017 would have been better than in 2022. Strelkov does not have the information the Kremlin possesses. Strelkov was butthurt because nobody came to help him in Slavyansk and he was forced to break through Ukrainian siege to Donetsk and he lost a lot of men in the process. I cannot blame him, Russian inaction was motivated by economic factors.
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Now that I think about it, besides economic factors, there were other reasons. Russia wasn’t fully done with Isis and those al Qaeda guys in Syria during those time. Fighting a two front war can be difficult. Such feats can be challenging even for US. There’s a reason why the situation in Middle East lately has caused so much anxiety among Muricans. On top of that, Putin may have hoped that Trump could normalize relationship with Russia or at least try to get Ukraine to knock it off and stick to Minsk agreement – this way, there would be very little need for any sort of military action from Russia’s behalf. But we all know Trump couldn’t do shit about it. Perhaps that was how it got delayed.
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I heard one of the economic ministers came to the Kremlin and said that Russia is not ready to withstand sanctions if they press it in the Donbas. And this was actually quite accurate back then.
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