“...Biden should have never stuck his nose into this situation to begin with.”
Sure, but politicians are entirely two faced. The Ukraine was stupid to believe the promises.
Fair point, but we also 'guaranteed' that new countries would not be admitted to NATO such that its borders would advance towards the Russian Federation. Since then, we have instead aggressively expanded NATO, attempting to effectively surround the RF. This expanded NATO of course, needs to justify its existence, and is continuously stationing troops and big time weapons as close to the Russian border as possible. However, since NATO are the 'good guys' these positions are undoubtably 'defensive' in nature, so thus cannot be questioned.
The thought experiment I like to do is to pretend I am Vladimir Putin, and Russia is my country. How would I react to certain situations to ensure my country's national security. It turns out that if you really reason through it, most of what Putin does is pretty normal.
As an example, let's look at the Crimea situation. Ukraine was in the midst of the Maidan coup. The constitution was being shredded in favor of the will of a bunch of protestors who were all hopped on cookies personally handed out by John McCain and Victoria Nuland.
Crimea (which was already an autonomous oblast, a common type of self-governing district in former Soviet countries) decided it didn't want anything to do with the Maidan BS. Simultaneously, the coup government decided that it wanted to revoke the Russian long-term lease of Sevastopol (the only Russian warm-water port and the home of the Black Sea fleet).
Putin was faced with a choice: 1) allow Russia to lose their port to a lawless mob that was obviously incited by foreign powers, or 2) take advantage of the fact that the Crimeans were pissed off and keep the port, plus make a lot of people in Crimea happy. He chose the best route for Russian national security, #2. Since the Ukrainian constitution had already been shredded by the coup, this wasn't any more or less legal than anything else that went on. I would have done the same, and to have done anything else would have been tantamount to dereliction of duty.
“Not disagreeing, but didn’t we ‘guarantee’ Ukraine’s safety/independence when they surrendered the Soviet nukes they possessed after the fall of the USSR?”
No.
Bill Clinton did.
And he never even submitted the agreement to the Senate for review. The Senate was uniformly opposed.