Oh, I think we do. He's a former KGB colonel and a hard-nosed politician. He's the only one who appears to be acting rationally in the sense of "realist" geopolitics. While his tactics may be unpredictable, that's part of a "rational" approach to conflict, attempting to exploit surprise to his advantage.

Living in postmodern democracies we're not used to this kind of old-fashioned statecraft, but we cannot say we can't understand him.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman