Ukraine: Was This Putin’s Plan All Along

I've always ignored the ridiculous attempts by the Western media to paint Putin as some comic book villain, it serves no purpose and is in fact dangerous to misrepresent one of the cleverest and savviest political animals of the modern era. You don't stay in charge of Russia this long by being an idiot. So I've been perplexed, why then did he get the invasion of Ukraine so wrong? Why did he not time a likely two month conflict closer to the US midterms to sow chaos in their economy and likely return a more favorable Republican house? Did he really underestimate the volume of international condemnation, crippling sanctions, pariah status and Western backing for Ukraine? Even the further bolstering of NATO and the EU - the thing that led to the war in the first place. Now several months in and Putin is looking far more stable, the Western worlds economies are in unsustainable free-fall as a result of the war, Putin has a much stronger hand and most telling of all, is opening up Ukrainian grain shipments to the third world, containing as much as possible the fallout of the war to the West. I thought the West's decision to start a proxy war with Russia by fueling the conflict in Ukraine was insanity - now I'm starting to wonder if it was Putin who started a proxy war with the West by invading in the first place, and knew exactly where we would be now. We willfully underestimate this man at our peril.