Briefly, on Ukraine...

Ukraine was neutral for 20 years until the US backed a coup in 2014 that installed a hostile-to-Russia leader, Petro Poroshenko, so that ended Ukraine’s neutrality. That was certainly provocative.

Putin's response was to take Crimea.

US scholar-statesman George Kennan called NATO enlargement a “fateful error.” President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Perry considered resigning in protest against Clinton’s NATO enlargement. Also opposed to NATO expansion were Henry Kissinger, former CIA Director, William Burns, and others.

After years of NATO expansion, the idea of Ukraine in NATO, a military alliance, is completely intolerable to Russia.

Before resorting to invasion, Putin had some actually reasonable demands which at least should have been discussed, but he was rebuffed.

That was provocative because UN principles require negotiations -- even after hostilities break out.

About a month into the war, Russia and Ukraine were actually negotiating with Turkey mediating, but the US told Zelensky to stop negotiating and they did, the talks thereby torpedoed.

Finally, here was what the war is about:

“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree it cannot do the kind of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told a press conference in Poland after returning from an unannounced visit to Ukraine.

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/04/25/us-makes-it-clear-its-aim-is-to-weaken-russia/

What a goal when doing so flirts with WW III.