1. The current Ukraine contains historically Russian territories that were moved to Ukraine in the era of USSR. Russian government cannot ignore originally Russian people living there. And Ukrainian nationalists are quite dangerous people. They are repressing proRussian people in the east. This is not something that Putin made up. My Russian acquaintances who work in the west directly know acquaintances and relatives living in the east Ukraine who witnessed such repression, namely, torture and murder. They joined the overturning of the government in 2014 holding the same flag as that they used when they cooperated with Nazis in 1940's. American government seems to often fund and arm such group of (almost terrorist) people, as they did to Mujahidn in Afghanistan (closely related to Taliban and AlQuaida) when it fought against Soviet.
2. The US have actually interfered with Ukraine and was likely involved in overturning the democratically elected Ukrainian government in 2014, establishing a puppet. Most notably, there was evidence, leaked conversation between American officials about who they want as the next Ukrainian leader. They had this conversation before the overturn actually happened, which even those US officials themselves admitted, although they denied American support of the overturn. Joe Biden was at the top of the then US administration, and his son earned millions of dollars in Ukraine afterwards. Anyone would suspect his deep involvement from this.
3. Russia has always been threatened by the economic aggression by the US. Putin was at first friendly to orgarches and the US when he took the position of president, but he started fighting them when they tried to sell off the shares of the companies that possess Russian natural resources to American capitals in 2004. If this had happened, the Russian oil money would have directly flowed into the US capitals, and therefore wouldn't have been accessible to Russian people. Notably, I was impressed by how IMF forced a country to privatise their state-owned companies and then American capitals tried to absorb them. Fortunately, this aggression was stopped by Putin, and a half of the shares of Russian oil companies are now owned by the state. This appears to be the key to the reason why the American government regard Putin as enemy.
4. Western media are highly suspected to intentionally broadcast distorted images of Putin. A typical example is Navalny's assassination. He claimed that he rang FSB agents and recorded their confession of the attempted assassination, by pretending to be their boss on the phone. What is this stupid story? He barely escaped from the assassination by FSB, and the notorious Russian spy agents confessed their attempt of assassination on the phone? Well, I personally believe that Putin is killing his opponents when they threaten his power. But, after hearing many such crappy stories from the western media, I started to believe Putin's opponents are sponsored by westerners that try to economically exploit Russia. 5. The current Ukrainian president who was from the south but elected by people in the pro-EU part, Zelensky, provoked Russia to an unthinkable extent. He showed the will to get back crimea, to crush the rebels in the east, to join NATO, and to increase their armament to cope with Russia (even nuclear armament). The first three plainly violates the Minsk agreement, and undermines Germany and France who joined it. Based on this fact, any sensible people would think that he risked own people's lives. From the fact that he could boldly do this, I suspect that he was backed by the US. No other countries would have been able to give him confidence to do so.
All these stories and others that I hear consistently indicate American aggression. Thus, despite pro-western media in my country, I started to believe that, even though Putin is a dictator and killing his opponents, he tells more genuine things. Europeans should reconsider their relationship with the US that destabilise Europe.