Western media outlets have portrayed Trump as being anything and everything that is wrong, evil, subhuman, fill in your own adjectives. They same the same about Putin.
Putin has his own reasons for what’s he is doing in Ukraine.
I don’t know what those reason are. I certainly won’t form an opinion from what I see on CNN or read in the NY times.
I know that there are plenty of “ethnic” Russians in Ukraine who were livid when Khrushchev gave away Crimea after the war. I’m willing to bet that a good part of the country wants to reunify with Russia.