You are, I fear, ignorant of the facts.
First, "supposed expansion" - seriously? Is it or is it not an expansion"? I can send you links to hundreds of articles and pronouncements where the Western powers BOAST of the "expansion" of NATO.
Russia was perfectly happy to have a neutral Ukraine on its border. MY GOD, MAN - the word "Ucraina" literally means "borderland" - both in Russian and in Polish - and that is what Russia always considered it to be.
I suggest you study history. Look up "Kievan Rus". This is the antecedent to what became both Russia and Ukraine. In fact, Kiev was the major city in the Russian amalgam. Moscow was the "second city."
That is why the Russians consider the Ukrainians to be their brothers.
Unfortunately, this "borderland" status meant that there were factions in the West that were not Russian. They did not worship in the Russian Orthodox church. They were Catholics, like the Poles. And they grew to hate the Russian Orthodox people who lived in the East.
Ukraine was always a country divided. East-West. Orthodox-Catholic.
In 2004, when the US was fomenting the so-called "Orange Revolution", Senator Richard Lugar commented on the great division evinced in the election results:
"The country is severely divided as it stands," Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., said after he returned from monitoring the November 21 runoff in Ukraine. "Some leaders in the eastern part of the country are talking about dividing the country. Clearly, the election divided it absolutely down the center, between the red and the blue states, to use the analogy from the United States."
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/12/ukraines-orange-revolution/305157/
Clearly, the only PEACEFUL way forward for Ukraine was to maintain NEUTRALITY, not aligning with either the West (NATO) or the East (Russia). This was the policy of Ukrainian leaders right up to Yanukovych. He was actually doing a good job of maintaining neutrality. But the U.S, could not allow that. They fomented the 2014 Maidan Coup, allying with Nazi and ultranationalist factions from the West of Ukraine (the Red States in Lugar's analogy) in order to take over the country - which left the people in the East (the Blue States in Lugar's analogy) out in the cold.
To put it in terms that Americans can understand: faced with a coup by the Red States, the people in the Blue States rebelled.
You can say that Russia is 100% responsible for the war in Ukraine, But in launching this war, Russia saved the world from a, much broader and more deadly war, and we should thank Vladimir Putin for that!
https://medium.com/@euroyankeeblog/how-vladimir-putin-saved-the-world-cca005eca0c9
