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He's very emotional about Ukraine.
Not to be rude but when I read posts like yours I wonder if people have looked at a map of the black sea.
Before Crimea, and Turkey going off the deep end this is what Russia's access was looking like. Worrying about, and preventing Ukraine and Turkey joining/being tied with the EU (and Ukraine from NATO to) is about as rational as it gets.
hugo7
@nick_h.
Putin believes that Ukraine isn't really a viable country and is effectively still part of Russia. He goes crazy about them claiming to be a separate democracy with their own elections. When Ukrainians had their Euromaidan demonstrations and demanded to join the EU, he put his snipers on a roof and killed lots of them in an attempt to fake a revolution, which he could use as an excuse to invade, in order to protect Ukraine's government. The plot failed because the snipers left lots of Russian army bullet casings on the roof.
He's very emotional about Ukraine. Plus he's a hostage to Russian nationalism. Lots of Russians agree that Ukraine's independence was the worst loss resulting from the USSR's breakup. Putin has painted himself into a corner recently. He has to win something out of all this. Having been in power for so long he must be thinking about his legacy, which ideally ought to be restoring a bit of Soviet strength and glory. He might think that conquering Ukraine would be worth the resulting sanctions in the long term because it would bind all the other central European former Soviet countries very tightly to Russia. A sort of rebirth of the USSR.