Slop.

Some leftists claim Russia was just reacting to NATO expansion. But: Ukraine offered to stay neutral before the 2022 full-scale invasion. They were willing to discuss security guarantees without joining NATO. Russia invaded anyway. Why? Because the issue wasn’t NATO. It was Ukraine’s independence.

This is just selectively ignoring all the important events that led up to Russia’s invasion:

1. The Ukrainian civil war erupted in 2014 when the new fascist coup regime repealed the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko Law that granted the status of regional languages to minority languages including Russian, on the very first day of taking power. This was seen as the beginning of Ukrainian ultranationalist move to ethnically cleanse the Russian minorities and hence the Donbass separatist uprising.
2. After the civil war, both Minsk Agreements explicitly planned the return of both Donbass oblasts to Ukraine, under the condition that the local governments will be given more autonomy on cultural rights such that minority rights cannot simply be repealed by the central authority, which we all know is ultimately to ethnically cleanse the Russians from the lands of Ukraine. Crimea, however, will not be returned for obvious reasons.
3. Ukraine rejected the implementation of both Minsk Agreements (because then they will not be allowed to ethnically cleanse the Russians), and instead, over the next 7 years, allowed NATO to openly train and arm its military.
4. After Biden came into office in 2021, Zelensky (overwhelmingly elected as the peace president) went to the White House and met with Biden, and came out with a completely different, much more aggressive stance, including openly flirting with joining NATO, overturning the Budapest Memorandum for non-nuclear proliferation etc.
5. Alarmed by the development, Russia called for an immediate security meeting with the US, which culminated in the US-Russia Summit in Geneva in June 2021. Russia proposed resolving their security concerns but was ignored by the US side.
6. Not two months after the Geneva “peace” summit, the Biden administration began sending Javelins and Stingers to Ukraine under the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA) in August 2021, then again in December 2021. A clear provocation to the Russians for attempting to deescalate.
7. By February 2022, artillery shelling against the pro-Russian Donbass provinces had increased in intensity by an order of magnitude. Peace would not hold. The rest is history.