Some Western-centric remarks.

• The history of the present Ukrainian territory is not a happy one. The land has been soaked with Ukrainian blood by Hitler and Stalin. Not being a historian, I’ll defer to my betters for a more cogent account of the timeline of that territory.
• I’m completely behind the Ukrainians in their resistance to Putin’s brutal war machine. Putin’s view is that Ukraine has been an administrative district of Russia all along and is now infested with NAZI brutes. That Ukraine fell under the control of NAZIs is absurd on its face, but to a Russian public trapped in a deep information silo, it is apparently plausible.
• According to Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhii at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard, from 1918 there were repeated failed attempts by the Bolsheviks to gain control of Ukraine. Lenin relented and concluded that it was necessary to grant Ukraine formal independence by 1922. This was necessary for the Bolsheviks to maintain control over Ukraine. Ukraine was granted autonomy as an independent state within the Soviet Union.
• In the recent 2023 meeting in Vilnius, NATO declined to accept Ukraine joining the organization. Russia has long made a show of believing that NATO wants to commit aggression against them. That NATO is a defensive pact somehow never sunk in. Ukraine joining NATO will only be seen by Putin as the latest and largest threat to Russian state security. Given how well the conventional military apparatus has performed in the attack on Ukraine, it isn’t safe to conclude that steady hands are hovering over the nuclear button.
• With the violent history of Russia in eastern Europe, why would anyone want to start a war of aggression against Russia there? Let’s say that the West waged war against Russia and won. They are not a nation of people begging for western-style democracy. Russia resents the cultural, military and political dominance of the West, that is, Western hegemony. The collapse of the USSR was a major loss of face for a great many in the Soviet Union, especially for Lieutenant Colonel and later FSB director Vladimir Putin. Putin openly seeks to “Make Russia Great Again,” and like Trump, is surfing on a wave of fear and nationalism.
• It seems certain that once Ukraine is in hand, Putin will continue with his murderous land-grab. The Baltic states, Poland, Georgia and a land corridor through Poland to Kaliningrad are all at risk and they know it. It is what was called the “Domino Theory” back in the cold-war days of the Viet Nam war. It was used to justify many military responses by the west to Russian expansionism.
• For the West, the challenge is to keep Putin’s Russia contained and yet away from the nuclear precipice. It is a game of who can outlast who.
• American apathy with foreign affairs has long been a common affliction. Sadly, the US Republican party is making a virtue out of admiring Putin and the burgeoning autocracy in Hungary. Since World War II, the US and Europe (formerly Western Europe) have had hegemony in the areas of dominant currency, finance, English language, military power projection and general commerce around the world. Today, Russia and China are quite clear that they wish to bring down this historical Western hegemony as soon as they can.

Definition: Hegemony, \hih-JEM-uh-nee\ noun. 1 : preponderant influence or authority over others : domination. 2 : the social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant group.

Wikipedia.

Definition: Liberal democracy is the combination of a liberal political philosophy that operates under a representative democratic form of government. It is characterized by elections between multiple distinct political parties, a separation of powers into different branches of government, the rule of law in everyday life as part of an open society, a market economy with private property, universal suffrage, and the equal protection of human rights, civil rights, civil liberties and political freedoms for all people. To define the system in practice, liberal democracies often draw upon a constitution, either codified or uncodified, to delineate the powers of government and enshrine the social contract. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_democracy#:~:text=In%20liberal%20democracy%2C%20an%20elected,distributes%20economic%20and%20social%20benefits.

• Under Chinese or Russian hegemony the world order will be very different than that held by the US and Europe. The US and Europe have various versions of liberal democracy and support other nations who do as well. To view the future, just have a look at how these two countries conduct government in their own countries. Care to live under the Chinese Communist Party’s or under Putin’s world order? As an American, the English lingua franca, for better or worse, seems to work fairly well. Imagine Westerners switching to written and spoken Mandarin. At least Russian is based on an alphabet. Am I biased towards alphabetic languages? Definitely.