1. I see instability coming from the Far East - Magadon-Sokul and several other cities in Kumchatka and Pacific Siberia have been struggling with riots and separatist tensions for the last couple of years, and the more that the Russian army gets tied up in Ukraine and the West, the more likely that you'll see others begin to take advantage of the opportunities. With Nato forces now being activated, I suspect you'll also see other Western former Russian Republics (and places like Finland, which had been neutral) wanting to join. Finally, I could see China taking the opportunity to test their Northern perimeter boundaries, and the Japanese laying claim to some of the contested Russian islands in the Japanese Archipelago.
I don't see Ukraine by itself being able to push back - while it's one of the largest countries in Europe, it's long been a Russian colony, and has been kept fairly poor. I do see them being able to keep the Russians from consolidating power, especially if they are fed arms and intelligence. However, that's going to be balanced out by keeping said weapons out of the hands of the Russians.
As to the quick invasion - yes I thought he felt it would be done in a matter of weeks. Remember the US and Iraq. The invasion was going to be a blitz, and it was ... until everything fell apart there. Afghanistan was supposed to be quick, and it became the longest war that the US had ever been involved in. War is complicated especially when nobody is wearing uniforms, and a civil war is the worst kind of war.
2. At one point during the pandemic under Trump, there was a very real possibility that the West Coast and the Northeast were about ready to say screw this, we are creating our own compacts and ignoring everything coming out of DC. There was a concerted effort on the part of (Russian backed) partisans to nullify an election in which the losing candidate clearly failed to meet even the minimum thresholds of being elected, we had daily rioting all across the country even as ICE was becoming Trump's personal Gestapo, and there were weekly white-racist based shootings and an attempt to kidnap a sitting governor. All this culminated with Jan 6. Have you noticed how quickly these incidents have de-escalated?
I have no doubt that had Trump successfully achieved re-election, this country would be engaged in the messiest form of civil war right now, one in which the legitimacy of the government outside of Trump himself was up for grabs. I think we're past the worst of this, and ironically, the one thing that Putin is now achieving is that he is uniting the United States in a way that it hasn't been in the last two decades. So, I'm more hopeful. I still think that there are tensions that NEED to be resolved or we still may be facing some kind of breakup, but I'm now of the opinion that it will likely not happen until the 2050s or later.
3. Xi is a consummate Chinese politician who has managed to turn parts of China into a capitalist state while not completely relinquishing power outside of the communist party. To understand how this is possible, it's necessary to remember that China is the world's oldest bureaucracy, going back at least 3,000 years. Many lower-level positions are actually democratically elected, but they are elected from different contenders in the Communist party, and senior-level positions then rise from these lower-level ranks, often selected by committees of more senior-level appointees.
Xi sees Putin as an uncivilized thug, one playing a longer game than the Americans and the Europeans (who refresh their senior ranks more often) but that nonetheless involves dominating the Eurasian continent. Xi is also trying to keep a balance going between the very conservative, sparsely populated regions in the mountainous West and North, and the very progressive populations of Beijing and the Yellow River estuary as well as the Southeast Asian archipelago and Hong Kong. They could conceivably take the lands north of Mongolia into Siberia, but it would be a lot like trying to claim the Northwest Territories of Canada - probably not worth the effort.
Xi Jinping studied in the United States and has a fairly deep grasp of American culture and geopolitical strategy. His interests are basically local - he's not as heavily focused on the reclamation of Taiwan as previous Secretaries General, and he much prefers conquest that's economic rather than militaristic in nature - and he has been far more successful in that respect. Putin was both a member of the Red Army and later head of the KGB, and his world view has been shaped by that, but he's used his position primarily to enrich himself and insulate him from oversight. He has to keep Xi pacified, however, because the Chinese Army outnumbers the Russians by about four to one, and have a considerable technological advantage, and could, if they were so inclined, make life very miserable for him and for Russian. However, it is naive to think that they are allies - only that they have certain interests in common (and then only tangentially).
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