NATO has been encircling Russia for decades. You just want to justify it as “people choosing democracy” when the fall of USAID and NED just shows that they were regime change operations orchestrated by the US. If peace was the point, the Minsk agreements would have been respected. If saving lives was the point, the UK wouldn’t have told Zelensky to fight a war they couldn’t win. Nothing about this conflict has been about ukrainian interests. It always was and still is about russian and american interests. You want to argue that what Russia is doing is imperialism, but it is the US that wishes to balkanize the country, and THAT is actual imperialism. But of course that wouldn’t bother you.