There are a lot of things in play. Another optional goal is to tighten up the local russian backgarden. Just like it was before Crimea snatching, population was rather frustrated with the powerholders, some bigger protests brewed in capital cities, and although they were even smaller than back then pre-Crimea, I see it as a sub-motivation, and them freely killing Navalny just after that, rolling out laws groving in their restrictiveness - I think these were their goals all along.

I want to live long enough to see a well-sourced documentary about reasons behind such decision. We know what it ended up being, and that by now it flowered with reasoning models from profit, to counter-defence against the united west, to a revenge narrative of ‘we are already balls deep, can’t stop now’. But I feel that there’s a good place for a movie, that ends just there, on cold 24 Feb night, when the hell gates opened. And the centerpiece are the decision-making, the preparation and media campaigns to muddy the water, the arguments, the denial it’s gonna happen, the corruption and a race to cover it’s traces by the time every system gets to the test, the misinformation that led to guys smelling their own farts. Let it be the Ocean Eleven heist prep part, let it show just how it’s not evil-first - although it’s useful for a counter-narrative - but how cynical, mismanaged, inheretly degraded, plain disfunctional this machine was. To see not a brutal dictatorship, but a gang of protection-racket thugs who thought they could, like Igor of Kiyv (supposedly) to collect twice on same folks, that they thought it should’ve been easy and were fixated on local politics, international standing than on themselves and their own ridiculousness, like Nicolas the 2nd starting the infamous ‘Little victorious war’ with Japan. Not to seed empathy, or wonder what it would be if this campaign wasn’t met with a worthy resistance, but to show the endgame of fascism. That it is the russian world that is to be exported elsewhere. That it is the object of pride to western contrarians, and to the US admin that is running fast to achieve the same. That speech, when the SMO was declared, and everyone nodded, could’ve been a fine ending that leaves the audience speechless and the whole theater unnervingly quiet.

I know my fellow countrymen are nearly unpenetrateable, but I feel like a bootleg of such a movie could’ve made a lot of crimethoughts.

It’s probably to nullify the incentive to use external LLMs, thus marking everything generated on the platform by the platform as such and also meaning Zuck can regulate what can actually be generated controlling the flow of LLM-gen content. If you put it that way, it doesn’t sound that senseless.