Stupid Russia - instead of invading and fighting the entire civilised world, they should have just bought Donbass and Crimea.
Ohhh man... you hit me where it hurts.
Putin is "old school". He doesn't get it, but he could have had what he desired if he just gave the process more time.
Speaking specifically about Ukraine:
1) We were their largest trade partner
2) Russian businessmen owned the largest cellular operator
3) Russian state-owned and private banks dominated Ukraine's banking sector
4) Russian tech companies like Yandex were killing it in the Ukrainian transportation and e-commerce markets
5) Russian companies dominated in the retail market
All this destroyed.
Further, our national champions lost hard won victories in other markets. Sberbank, which had ambitions of being the largest bank in Europe, had to sell its banks in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Turkey, Austria, and elsewhere. Yandex, to preserve what it had, became a Dutch company.
The largest car manufacturer, owner of the Lada brand, and controlled by Renault-Nissan was getting ready to export cars manufactured in Russia.
Moscow's airports were turning into international hubs for flights between Europe and Asia.
All this lost.
We could have done with Ukraine what we did with Georgia. They lost a war to us, were extremely angry with us for about ten years, but then came crawling back after a Russian-backed oligarch came into power and reestablished economic ties. Now their entire country is owned by Russia, and they are forgetting about the EU and NATO as they get drowned in Russian money.
A Ukraine in the EU, but fully owned by Russia, could have been a powerful instrument of influence for us within the EU.
Putin doesn't trust these sneaky bourgeois methods. He doesn't think they're reliable. He thinks that if they go into the EU, the West will then figure out some way of squeezing Russian interests out of Ukraine. But how?
Would the EU really have forced Ukraine to expel Russian investors? At that point we really could have invaded, and everybody would fully understand our position.