What Putin Fears Most

Everybody is doing lots of mind reading when it comes to Putin. What the piece outlines though is that Putin didn’t have a big problem with the NATO expansion while it happened (provided that the depiction is factually correct ofc), while he clearly did have a problem with Ukraine becoming democratic and losing its pro Russia leadership. Also, as is explained, there was no risk whatsoever that Ukraine actually would have joined the NATO for the foreseeable future. To me, drawing the conclusions that the piece draws appears to be more than mind reading. It’s rather putting one and one together.

They're not mind reading. They're taking Putin's own statements at face value. That may in itself, be questionable, but it's hardly psychic.

When the kremlin is involved, mind-reading isn’t, historically, much of a deviation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kremlinology#Techniques:

“During the Cold War, lack of reliable information about the country forced Western analysts to "read between the lines" and to use the tiniest tidbits, such as the removal of portraits, the rearranging of chairs, positions at the reviewing stand for parades in Red Square, the choice of capital or small initial letters in phrases such as "First Secretary", the arrangement of articles on the pages of the party newspaper Pravda and other indirect signs to try to understand what was happening in internal Soviet politics.

To study the relations between Communist fraternal states, Kremlinologists compared the statements issued by the respective national Communist parties, looking for omissions and discrepancies in the ordering of objectives. The description of state visits in the Communist press were also scrutinized, as well as the degree of hospitality lent to dignitaries. Kremlinology also emphasized ritual, in that it noticed and ascribed meaning to the unusual absence of a policy statement on a certain anniversary or holiday.[10]

In the German language, such attempts acquired the somewhat derisive name "Kreml-Astrologie" (Kremlin Astrology), hinting at the fact that its results were often vague and inconclusive, if not outright wrong.”