The whole thing is about parochial nonsense and history, not current realities.
For Putin it’s about emulating Peter the Great and undoing the “catastrophe” of 1991.
For the pro Putin legacy Tea Party, it’s still all about the brown guy and his birth certificate, Biden and Nuland.
For pro Russian separatists it’s all about Poroshenko replacing Yanukovych... And Stephan Bandera, a very long dead dude.
For Azov, it’s all about Stephan Bandera being a lesser evil compared to Stalin. (”He may be a bastard but at least he’s our bastard”).
For Europe it’s about 30 years of fragile peace and cheap heating, and yet another tidal wave of refugees.
For ordinary Russians it’s all about (actually 5 that ended 3 years ago but the Kremlin says 8 ongoing, so...) years of genocide.
For most Ukrainians, Russia is at best a very arrogant bigger brother, at worst a toxic sibling who won’t deal with his own problems and just messes up everybody else’s lives with his drama.
Nicely put. I’d add that for the UK it’s about knitting woolly hats for the refugees. The scale of every international crisis is quantifiable by the number of hats knitted.