All this because Putin is a tyrant who wants to reconstitute the Soviet Union. He should have had a nice dinner instead of ordering a brutal invasion unprovoked and dropped his imperial ambitions.
Your opinion is low information. If Putin’s goal was expansion, some of countries below would be easier to conquer by orders of magnitude than Ukraine, because of size.
Norway, Finland, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Poland, Georgia, Mongolia, Latvia, Estonia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, etc all border with Russia.
But Ukraine/Zelensky was the only one clamoring for NATO membership. None of the others were.