If you have already shown your hand to your opponent, i.e. we won’t give jets, we won’t escalate, we won’t etc., then you have already lost the pot.
Think Texas Hold’em. Everyone sees 5 cards. The 2 face down cards are the killers.
There is a big difference between havng a "cool head’ and being frozen. Putin knows that right now NATO is frozen into inaction.
The NATO alliance is a defensive alliance. If you attack one, you attack them all. There is nothing in the NATO agreement that I’m aware of that states let’s respond to a non-NATO country that’s been invaded.
Putin is a great student of history and so far has made all the correct moves to achieve his aims.
He may be a student of history, but he’s getting a F unless his aim was to resuscitate NATO from being mostly dead (He’s only mostly dead. If he were all dead, there’s only one thing you can do. Go through his pockets and look for loose change), cripple the Russian economy, unify the world against Russia, and have countries like Finland even remotely suggest maybe they should join NATO (check out a map and see who Finland shares a 3,000+ km border with - hint: it’s not Sweden).
AW