Russia and Ukraine

[Anomalocaris]

He doesn't really need to subdue Ukraine if he can subdue Kyiv and a couple of big cities.  Regime change and occupation are different goals.

History is replete with examples of would-be conquerors who held the cities and lost the country due to the rubes being in revolt against them. He would need Russian troops to dealt with such a revolt (he’d be hard-pressed to find enough Ukrainian collaborators to matter).

Boru

Not necessarily.    The rebel of the primarily Russian speaking breakaway provinces to the east form a natural reservoir of motivated native collaborationist enforcers similar to the Vichy milice.     Modern Ukraine is an somewhat arbitrary, short term convenience based assemblage of different ethnicities, languages, and loyalties created by Soviet Union.   Much of the industrial and demographic core actually rests along the boundary between areas of dominantly Ukrainian ethnicity and heavily Russified or russophone areas.    

Ukraine’s infrastructure was not set up to support a resilient independent state, but to support centralized management as a center of heavy defense industry and collectivized agriculture.   So much of Ukraine depends on a series of dams on the Dniper and a few enormous nuclear power plants for power.     No doubt the recent attack on one of these Soviet legacy mega nuclear power plants was part of Putin’s strategy to put the Russian heel on the jugular of post war ukraian economy.   No doubt in putin’s plan these key power plants will end up in the hands of Russified or russophone “autonomous” regions inside any nominally “independent and neutral” post war Ukraine, or to become connected to parts of crimea Russia annex outright.