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Otherwise the russians would start with much smaller and weaker countries

You mean, like Georgia? Or Moldova? Yes, you are right. That's also what they did. And the Russia did not mean to begin a war with Ukraine. Putin had spent several billions into bribing Ukrainian officials. He had found a large amount of Ukrainians who were willing to inform him about the sentiments in Ukraine, and they unanimously told that Ukrainians either want to become part of the Russia or will be completely okay with that.

Putin had not recognized that since 2014, most Ukrainians were strongly against the Russia. And he had not understood that almost none of the Russian-speakers in Ukraine identified as Russian. Because most Russian-speakers for example in Estonia or Moldova do identify as Russians. (In Estonia this has lately somewhat changed, BTW. Possibly in Moldova as well, but I don't know that much about what's going on over there right now!)
The only people willing to give any information to him were those from a very small minority of Ukrainians that were indeed pro-Russian. I used to like the L'viv–Mariupol train because it was the only night train that arrived to Vinnytsia, where I lived, at a sensible time. Other trains arrived around 4 in the night, this one around 8. Much nicer that way! And there I did have conversations with people from Mariupol city, and I could find people who were indeed pro-Russian. But those were not many at all!
When Putin gave the order for the full-scale invasion, he knew that Ukrainians will not fight. He knew that almost all of the Ukrainian military leadership had been succesfully bribed. Because that's what all of his aides told him. That's what the most trusted people around him were telling him. He did not try invading a strong country. He started a military march into a large but extremely weak country that he knew would immediatelly fold.

But he was wrong, because he had built an extremely biased group of sources, and he had promoted exceptionally corrupt people into the Russian leadership. Almost none of those billions meant for bribery of Ukrainian military was actually used for bribery. It went almost exclusively into buying cool yachts for the people responsible for delivering the bribes.