Yes. Bullies back away most often when the counter measure is immediate and less often the longer they can inflict their measures on their victims.
When Russian agents got involved in attacks on Americans in Syria Trump responded immediately with a number of Russian military killed. It never happened again.
If Putin can get away with what he wants to do in Ukraine, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia will have targets on their backs, and Putin will try to take them, sooner or later. That will have to have a NATO response (because all three are NATO members/partner), but at that time Putin will make the attacks from the territories of Ukraine (by air) & Belarus (by land - which he is already building up in Belarus to do), putting the immediate theater of war not over Russia, and he hopes saving his forces over in Russia.
Putin can be countered now over Ukraine without any NATO response in or over Russian territory. Putin knows it which is why he is saber rattling about his nukes. He does not want to leave Ukraine alone but knows that that can work both ways - can stay out of Russian territory but don’t have to leave Ukraine alone. We don’t have to attack anything inside Russia. We only have to limit operations to where his attacks are taking place - inside Ukraine.
If we wait, instead of being a limited NATO-Putin skirmish over the territory of Ukraine, it will be WWIII. If we defend Ukraine now, Putin is done. If we don’t, Putin will try to keep going as Hitler did after no one stopped his initial conquests.
In reality, most war plans do not survive first contact with the enemy, simply because the enemy is never as predictable as the planners like to think. Therefore, while it's generally interesting to meet people who think they can predict the future, meeting such people becomes more of a concern when they advocate military action, particularly against forces armed with nuclear weapons operating on the borders of their own homeland. In those rare cases when a person is so confident of their prescient abilities that they would risk nuclear war, solely on the basis of their own predictions of the future, one hopes that individual is not occupying any relevant position of authority...
;>)