Not really. My American mind gets in the way. I'd have gone ham on them already but that's what we do. Russians are different. Legalities and paperwork are of extreme importance to them. Even the soviets would read someone their arrest papers as the were beating the sh*t out of them. They shuffled people around work camps to avoid their sentences running out just to somehow keep it legal in their mind even though it was obvious what they were doing. Putin quotes international law and the UN all of the time when he knows we in the west don't care at all.
I'm pretty sure he does it for the sake of his own people. He dives in to details about the SMO and now what it means to legally declare the Ukrainians as a terrorist government and that means he can escalate but to war levels. There is a whole other set of legal requirements for that. In the Russian mind there is a process to how they prosecute this conflict. To us, it's just shock and awe all of the time.
Maybe Touch can explain it better but I've had Russians try to explain it and it still doesn't seem right to Americans.
