I'm pretty sure that folk like Ritter have said that Russia had good intelligence to indicate that the mass of Ukrainian troops, perhaps amounting to 90,000, were preparing to invade the Donbas and fight the Donbas militia and the Russian troops aiding them in a very short time frame - so there was likely a military urgency here that long-term threats to gas supplies wouldn't help. And wasn't Russia right, Europe cut off its gas supplies on its very own so in what way would fighting a gas war or trying to blackmail Europe with gas supplies work? In addition, and more importantly, the US actually wanted Russia to cut off the gas supplies, and when they didn't they made sure Europe did, even to the point of blowing up the gas pipe line,

No, I wouldn't exactly call this argument facile, but it was far too late in the game to have been a Russian option. .

If the US and neocons' in Europe idea was to deliberately precipitate a physical military attack in Ukraine, they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. To blame Russia for doing something that the US was so desperately working towards in any case could be seen as highly hypocritical, or at the best as seriously misguided.

Then again, the Russians and Putin are a bit less stupid and likely more cynical than the West imagines, if gas supplies to Europe provided billions of dollars every week to Russia why stop that before they needed to? Wasn't it some Russian said that a capitalist will sell you the rope you use to hang him?

Finally, Russia had warned the US and NATO of the consequences of expanding NATO to its borders for around twenty five years, Russia would have long since realised the the West was immune to reason, and the the inbuilt hatred of its motherland, the West's centuries old Russophobia, was going to triumph over every other consideration, perhaps upto full conventional warfare, and beyond. Ben Wallace is proof of that, in his remark "The Scots Guards kicked the backside of Tsar Nicholas the First in 1853. We can always do it again" - though the obvious problem that presents itself to me is that the UK doesn't now have enough horses, and didn't the Turks have some part in that dearth of suitable animals?