My guess is that Putin's endgame now is to re-annex, offcially or unofficially, much if not all of the Russian speaking parts of the Ukraine. My understanding is that he offered the West and the Ukraine findlandisation but they rejected this, to me reasonable, offer but then the West was behind the over throwing of an elected govenment in the Ukraine in 2013 and 2014 sympathetic to Russia. Left without many options--one commentator noted Putin has, compared to Imperial America and her groupies, a relatively weaker poker hand though he has up until now played it well--Putin may well have, as a result of attacking Ukraine and thanks to the red faced vigilante response driven largely by propaganda around the globe directed at Russia as a result of the attack, overplayed his relatively poor hand.
By the way, it appears that Russia, in a act of hubris similar to that of that other much stonger and more hegemonic great power the US, may have thought it would only take the 200,000 troops--the number of troops according to sources Russia sent the Ukraine--to take the Ukraine...
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