You have to remember that Putin and Russia are not like the old USSR. That was truly evil. If you listen to the interview with Putin and Tucker, Putin wanted to work with Bush and Clinton but got turned away. I think Putin was very disillusioned by that and that Boris Johnson squashed the peace talks in Istanbul. Boris was a messenger of the West to say to Ukraine to go forward with the war. I believe the West wanted to cut up Russia (remember “an excuse for a gas station”) like they did with Ukraine. They thought it would be an easy war and they would win. They believed their own propaganda of how weak and inferior Russia was. So the West got bitch-slapped and because they got EVERYTHING WRONG! Wrong tactics, wrong training methods, shortage of shells, shortage of weapons, shortage of trained men (not ones that were forced by press gangs), shortage of jests, shortage of missiles, etc. This colossal failure is a time of learning for the West. But will they?
They are not trying to push communism, but they are trying to subjugate another country to Russian rule. That is bad enough.
It's not like Russia under the Czars was all that great, neither.
As far as who thought it would be an easy war to win, that appears to be Putin's folly. The "Biden" regime did nothing to impede it when war was imminent and was ready to write-off the whole country after a few days when they offered Zelensky a ride out. The West was as surprised as Putin by the tenacity of Ukrainian resistance and basically shamed into providing niggling support. And two years later and even after months of supply shortages the Ukrainians are still fighting well and forcing Russian advances to a crawl. The Russians attacked Terny for 4 months, lost 100+ armored vehicles and having exhausted reserves in that sector, the Ukrainians took 1.5 km back. Novomykhailivka is littered with the carcasses of 300+ Russian vehicles and thousands of Russian corpses.
As far as training goes, Western training assumes conditions for maneuver warfare, especially functioning air forces and capable combined arms, things of which neither side is capable. Using armor piecemeal against entrenched defenders behind minefields would have been a fool's game even in WWII. Everyone (including the Russians) expected fast movement reminiscent of WWII or the Gulf War, but both sides got the Somme instead. Shortages are simply failure stemming from lack of investment in productive capacity which will be slowly remedied, and the West (like Russia) has reached out to allies like SK for additional munitions. And Russia's conventional artillery advantage is less than it seems (even with the FABs) when I've watched a Ukrainian command center with 5 or 6 guys and several FPV drone posts with a similar number each slowly and methodically hunt down almost all the vehicles and men of a Russian company: they're too dispersed and hidden to be easily targeted by artillery.