> And what I say is true. There are multiple imperial instigators in this war. Russia is certainly one of them.

What you said is patently false there is only one imperial instigator in this war, that’s Russia what remains after that is the imagined fever dreams of people trying to justify and support a war of imperialism by Russia that is systematically doing what it can to wipe out the existence of the country it seems to subjugate.

All the supposed "provocations" boil down to Ukraine doing whatever it can to avoid becoming a Russian colony again - which in Russian agitprop parlance is euphemistically termed "infringing on Russian geopolitical interests" or similar. There's no equivalence between the sides in Ukraine at all, even if US is also an empire and pursues its own imperial goals elsewhere.

Not even Putin is dumb enough to think that NATO presents a threat to Russia, and even he could have seen the obvious effect that an invasion would have of galvanizing the alliance.

The threat to his regime and its legitimacy is to have a democratic neighbor with russian speakers who live better lives, in what is a former colonial subject of the glorious russian empires.

NATO does make a great bogeyman though for internal audiences, to shift attention away from the futures they are deprived of by dictatorship.

Yanukovych was removed by the Ukrainian parliament on a vote of 328–0 out of 450 members. Russia doesn't have a right to be upset that Ukraine kicked out a corrupt puppet.

As for NATO expanding east, Russia has something of a grievance there but the U.S. and NATO should never have relegated some of the former Soviet states to the status of "buffer regions" in perpetuity in the first place. Those countries have the right to self-determination and security just like anyone else.