In your analogy, you’re treating China as an adversary not a partner. Which means you’re not comparing like with like.
Russia, Ukraine, the EU, the UK and the USA, were all IN A NATO PARTNERSHIP TOGETHER (it was even called the “Partnership for Peace” - look it up!) and there were MULTIPLE treaties and memoranda between all of us, declaring the old Cold War enmity over and asserting that we’re all friends now, when Russia started attacking all of us.
Even if the USA had factions that couldn’t stop treating Russia like the Soviet Union, on the other side of the Atlantic we were all trying to make an effort to bring Russia in from the cold. Ukraine had elected a pro-Moscow president. Relations between Russia, Poland and the Baltic countries were thawing. Russia was GIFTED a seat at the Council of Europe. Putin was given the VIP treatment at EU NATO headquarters. The idea we were all threatening Russia is just arrant nonsense.
But, after spending 2001-2005 pretty much saying that this thawing is what he wanted, Putin and Medvedev then started tag-teaming attacks against Europe, Ukraine, the UK, and the USA too. Specifically, they:
1. Attempted to assassinate a Ukrainian presidential candidate (he lost fairly, so there wasn’t even a need to attempt a hit.)
2. Orchestrated a plane “crash” (i.e. like Prigozhin’s!) that took out a whole bunch of Polish politicians and diplomats.
3. Blackmailed eastern Europe repeatedly by interfering with the oil and gas supplies.
4. Orchestrated Cyber-attacks on Europe and the USA, from Russian state actors, Russia-sponsored criminal groups, North Korean groups, Iranian groups, and groups operating out of China. And I would not be exaggerating if I said Moscow has been specifically waging a cyber war against the USA non-stop for the last 20 years (with successive US administrations blindly pretending it isn’t happening.)
5. Used polonium and novichok on British soil to assassinate Putin’s personal enemies. Tell me, if the Russkies used radioactive weapons in an American city, deliberately, and Americans died, would you be happy if the US administration turned a blind eye?
For far too long the USA and Germany and France kept turning a blind eye to every escalation by Medvedev and Putin. Every single time Putin escalated without cause, all we got was crickets from Washington. Accompanied by the Useful Idiots bleating “For the love of God, please don’t poke the bear!” as if they weren’t acutely aware that the bear was the one doing all the poking but nobody had any idea how to slap Russia down.
I don’t think you’re seeing the big picture here. “There’s no better grift than an active war” could easily be levelled at Putin himself. He’s the ONLY one who has been jonesing for this war since COVID paranoia rotted his brain.
Ask yourself how Vladimir Zhirinovsky was so triumphantly announcing to the Duma that Ukraine was going to get a very nasty surprise on a day in late February, shortly before dawn... over a month before Putin issued an ultimatum to NATO (the December 2021 one where he basically demanded the USA unilaterally shaft the rest of NATO and rewrite its charter so that Russia had a veto even over NATO exercises on NATO soil - and if the USA did not comply, he’d invade Ukraine.)
Three months after VZ blew Putin’s surprise, Putin was still insisting that he had any invasion plans at all, and Lavrov was angrily accusing the West of fearmongering. The presenters on Rossyia 1 were all protesting that it’d be UTTERLY UNTHINKABLE that Russia would ever stoop so low as to invade its beloved brother.
Within two weeks Putin had launched his invasion, and was in the process of criminalising any overt protest against the invasion. So if you believe Putin was dragged reluctantly into this quagmire rather than this quagmire being one that he, personally, had been planning for over a year, then I’ve got three London Bridges and a six-pack of Eiffel Towers to sell you.
According to Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev, in 1993 Yeltsin had been led to believe that Partnership for Peace would be an alternative to NATO membership, not a program for it, although the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service, Yevgeny Primakov, told him this was a way to begin NATO expansion. Yeltsin still authorized Russia to become a member of the PfP on 22 June 1994, but later said he felt betrayed after NATO declared that PfP was a path to membership in December 1994. In early 1995 he changed Russia's policy as being opposed to any NATO expansion.
https://transatlanticrelations.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/19-Kozyrev.pdf
Orchestrated a plane “crash” (i.e. like Prigozhin’s!) that took out a whole bunch of Polish politicians and diplomats.
Your buy in on this conspiracy casts some doubt on your other conclusions. Air Disasters committed an episode to this event, and even includes your political conspiracy theory, but it wasn't determined to be the cause. Pilot error during a landing attempt in the fog at a strip without ILS was the cause:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui21EV4zoPA
You can fast forward to ~36min for an explanation of the pilots' mistaken assumption and how it led to the crash.
Every single time Putin escalated without cause
This presumes Russia should perceive no threat from a NATO that was demonstrably willing to attack and partition neighboring states without UN authorization. If you recognize that reality, you can recognize why Russia didn't want NATO for a neighbor. They didn't want the NATO (read: U.S.) to have a higher military potential to intervene in a separatist like Chechnya the way they intervened in Kosovo. The NATO regime change effort in Libya was even more egregious, and only reinforced their fears and determination to avoid NATO as a neighbor.
So if you believe Putin was dragged reluctantly into this quagmire rather than this quagmire being one that he, personally, had been planning for over a year
I don't believe, and have never stated, that Russian planning for what to do the event NATO ignored further warning didn't start until after the neocons rejected the Russians last bid for a new security arrangement that took all parties concerns into consideration.