It's historically accurate to point to the American empire's matchless record of cornering potential peer competitors into facing two high risk bad choices:
1. Encircling Japan with bomber bases and cutting off oil and scrap metal in 1940-41 to force Japan into either a humiliating withdrawal from China or to attack its imperial rivals in the Pacific.
2. Lendlease to support the UK and the USSR against Nazi Germany.
3 Supporting an Islamist insurgency against a Soviet-backed Afghan regime in 1979-89.
4. An entirely theoretical SDI fueling an arms race in 1983-89 that bankrupted the USSR into spending 15% of GDP on the military as oil prices plunged to $10/barrel.
Knowing this, as Putin surely does, why would he launch a quagmire war in Ukraine? Bill Browder's answer is the best: to protect his institutional transvestite regime--a mafia kleptocracy cross-dressing as a country from the building rage of the Russian people. Every time he started a wag the dog war, Russian nationalism shored up his legitimacy in the eyes of the vast mass of ethno-nationalist Russians.
Kleptocracy can't survive without the collective narcissist pathology of ethno-nationalism. A prosperous independent Ukraine threatened to ruin this game, which explains the kill it if I can't have it nature of this war.
Speak Russian and visit Russia, and you'll understand it. They see themselves as the white masters and the other ethnic groups in Russia as the non-white serfs, especially if they're Muslim Tadzhiks, Kirghiz, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Chechens or Turkmen. Christian Georgians are another matter.
Your energy efficiency explanation confuses correlation and causation. It's a red herring distraction that prevents understanding the real cause: the blood and soil racialist empire building Russian ethno-nationalism that keeps Putin in power. Russia is a colonial land-based empire built on a foundation of conquest by white Christian Russifying ethnic supremacy. This is five centuries of Russian history you ignore. Your blame the West and the US thesis exculpates this simple fact of Russian history and Russia's failure to transform itself into a normal modern nation-state that accepts a rules-based international order, however fragile that order may be. Your energy first blame the West thesis, like Mearsheimer's realpolitik version, assumes that Russia somehow has a legitimate right to a sphere of influence in its near abroad. When Georgia, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Armenia, the Stans, Ukraine, the Baltic States do not accept this is a geopolitical fait accompli they, and western alliances that support them, are "provoking" Russia. What is in fact provocative is Russia's insistence that its near abroad live in a limbo of crippled sovereignty involuntarily shared with an imperial neo-Tsarist Russian kleptocracy that demands they live in puppet kleptocracies like Ukraine did under Yanukovych.
The British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, German, Japanese and Italian empires are dead, consigned to the dustbin of history. Russia needs to join them. The American empire, built on a network of voluntary alliances and 800 bases, is a different species and a different discussion.
The best short term way to reduce European demand for Russian natural gas is to reopen Germany's nuclear power plants and export US and Canadian LNG to the few LNG terminals Europe has. Lithuania jiust finished one and is now free of Russian gas. The departure of western oil and oil service firms will do the rest of the job of killing Russia's energy industry.
Use the Defense Production Act to guarantee a return to LNG exporters like Cheniere Energy so they can tell the shareholders who want return of capital that it's ok to go for growth because Uncle Sam will protect them from the bust that follows the boom (as in 2015-17).
On kleptocracy read the Hudson Institute's Kleptocracy Initiative: https://www.hudson.org/research/12928-the-kleptocracy-curse-rethinking-containment
