Since Russia's Ukraine erasure project predates all western behavior by three centuries, the correlation of the invasion to it is a very simple number: zero.

All of NATO's former Warsaw Pact and former Soviet members asked to join from 1997-2004 knowing full well that their window of opportunity to do so would soon close and the Putinator edition of the old empire would say "I'll be back". Since then, no Russian invasion except for cyberwarfare against Estonia. Finland joined last year, putting NATO's border with Russia at a three hour drive from St Petersburg. No invasion. Putin's July 2021 screed proclaiming Ukraine's non-existence doesn't even mention NATO. Russia's behavior since the war started--mass deportations, filtration camps with torture rooms, child kidnapping, Ukrainian language erasure/bans--show that all the geopolitical victimhood pretexts for invasion are empty. Putin launched the war solely for regime preservation. He fears the threat of the good example next door: a prosperous EU member democracy with a free press, real elections and an un-enserfed population. Regime preservation dictates he must wall off his enserfed subjects from all of this, creating a gigantic North Korea.

Russia has advertised a dozen different pretexts for invasion since January 2022: war against the decadent western queer/gay/trans parent 1 and parent 2 culture, protect Russian speakers in the Donbass, "de-Nazification", against American/NATO unipolarism and/or imperialism, restore Russian lands that Peter the Great conquered (including Finland, Poland and the Baltics)....

Portraying Russia as geopolitical victims is just RT useful idiocy and the Russian edition of the Trumpster MAGA cult that admires Orban and Putin.

And, lastly, the former Warsaw Pact and Baltic states are sovereign. They have the right to choose their alliances. Full stop. Russia has no say or veto about where they go geopolitically. The same goes for Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, Singapore and Japan.