I'm really writing this against better judgement, but here goes...
1) Every single penny in the defense budget of my country (Europe) is spent to create deterrence against Russia. Russian expansionism is not "the thing of the day" except for on US TV channels. For everybody living next to Russia, this has been a thing since the time of the tsars. If you hadn't heard about Russia and Ukraine before the US democrats replaced their face masks with blue and yellow flags, that's because you are in the US mainstream media bubble. Out in the real world, it was a thing during and before covid. Don't blame the Ukrainians for that.
2) Having said that, everybody from Boris Johnson to Volodimir Zelensky knows perfectly well that Ukraine is an extremely corrupt country and pretty much a failed state. The point is that Ukraine is rising from being a puppet state and a weakling to becoming a decent, functional, independent country. Russia wants it to be an obedient minion, so it had to strike now, before Ukraine had sorted itself out. This war has waaay less to do with whatever the current or previous US president did or didn't do than most americans seem to think.
God bless America and all, but whenever the topic of eastern Europe comes up, I just "no hablo amerikano" and try to drift out of the conversation. The one American (except for Mearsheimer) that I really respect on this topic is Kotkin. Listen to that guy, especially his recent interview on Lex Friedmans podcast.