re: What if Putin’s strategy is more complex

I think you underestimate him.

The Russians have been playing nice nice, but that won't last forever. Their style is blitzkrieg, and nobody knows why they are deviating yet.

Just the fact that we really haven’t gotten any actual confirmed insight into the goals, schemes, thought processes, strategies etc is rather notable in my opinion. How often does the U.S. and the rest of the west have to speculate so much as to an adversary’s inner workings? And to the point of “well isn’t it likely that our intelligence community has that type of info and we just aren’t aware” I’d say I wouldn’t believe that there would’ve been no leaks whatsoever between our own government as well as those of the other NATO countries either by “accident” or by design. Seems to me that Putin’s running a pretty tight ship, responding to the changing circumstances on the ground as is normal, and hasn’t tipped his hand with any publicly disclosed blunders and such.