If western countries valued peace, they would recognize that it would be more diplomatically stable to have neutral buffer States between the Russian border and the NATO countries. They also could have done more to economically integrate with post-soviet Russia in the 1990s. the reality is that NATO countries don't actually value peace, but rather their capitalist leadership would rather "contain" capitalist Russia than integrate, so NATO expansion it has been.

Ukraine is not Russian territory, but is extremely strategically important from a military standpoint. Any discussion of NATO membership is going to be perturbed as an existential threat to Russia, this is an obvious analysis from both sides. There is no "defensive" benefit to making Ukraine a member of NATO, unless the purpose is to mantain an existential threat toward Russia.

I can't confidently say that my analysis above justifies a Russian invasion of Ukraine, but Putin obviously doesn't care what I think. I wish it would not have happened, but I understand what brought everything to this point, and now the Ukrainian people must suffer for decades because western imperialist forces are not interested in building a strong global peace.