when russia annexed crimea and gave separatists in eastern Ukraine weapons they knew they were starting a proxy war

NATO has been arming and training with far right movements in post-soviet states since the early 90s. It didn't start in 2014. Gorbachev and Yeltsin were guaranteed "no NATO expansion" and it happened anyway. Several post-soviet states bordering Russia (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) have already fallen into the NATO command hierarchy. What makes Ukraine particularly worrisome to the Russians is the proximity to the capital.

When countries don't appear to wish to join NATO, soft coups are utilized to make these countries more cooperative. Joining NATO isn't a democratic decision, the people aren't consulted. NATO is a military alliance, and post-soviet states are being coerced into joining that military alliance. The US continues to see its own preponderant power as a strategic necessity for the indefinite future. If this means subordinating post-soviet nations to the US military's command structure, then so be it. If this means arming and enabling fascists all over Europe to suppress the left, then so be it. If this means getting a bunch of civilians killed in proxy wars, then so be it.

When NATO began expanding, several people warned this would result in future conflicts. NATO isn't just giving Ukrainians weapons to defend themselves. Joining NATO means joint training exercises. It means profits for America's arms manufacturers, it means letting US troops into your country. It means letting US missiles be stationed in your country. The US has been coercing post-soviet states to join NATO since 1993, and NATO was created in 1949, before the Warsaw pact to combat "soviet aggression" right after they had freed Germany from fascism, and it was staffed by former nazis. This shit isn't a joke and there's a reason people react aversely to it. Furthermore ethnic cleansing in Ukraine provided an incentive to recognize the independence of the breakaway states. Putin shouldn't have invaded, but there were several on the Russian left that have been arguing for recognizing DPR and LPR for 8 years. Obviously he did this cynically in response to aggression when he should have done it a long time ago, but even if he had done it a long time ago, before the ethnic cleansing even started, it would have been framed as annexation or aggression. The thing to keep in mind is the absolute power the US and NATO forces hold over the situation and its evolution. They had several opportunities to fulfill a promise they made in the 90s, and instead they broke that promise at every opportunity because projecting power in the region was more important for their economic and strategic interests. They view everything as a zero sum game, and any amount of PR spin and power projection and pre-emptive expansion is permissible under their guiding neo-colonial, imperialist, capitalist ideology.

The US is operating with the specific and well-documented intent of destabilizing the region and creating a European military hierarchy that answers to the United States. Putin responded to this in an aggressive way, but the point is to recognize that the aggression of the US predates and eclipses.

from Washington Bullets by Vijay Prashad

The US already had bases in almost every country; now these were expanded through the use of ‘lily-pad bases’, or cooperative security locations where US forces can land, refuel, and relax. US Ambassador to NATO Victoria Nuland described these cooperative security locations as ‘unobtrusive bases’ run by ‘retired American non-combatants’ who would outsource or subcontract the base maintenance work. Most militaries around the world would be forced to train with the US military in joint exercises that plugged in the military commands of these lesser states to the US command structure. The term here is ‘inter-operatability’, with militaries required to operate in a coordinated fashion with the US armed forces; the Doctrine for Joint Operations (1993) of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff notes that ‘the nation providing the preponderance of forces and resources typically provides the commander of the coalition force’. No guesses for who provides the ‘preponderance’ of military personnel and equipment, and therefore who leads. To be inter-operatable, the militaries around the world would be encouraged to buy US military hardware and software; little wonder then that the US arms companies saw their overseas sales balloon as these military-to-military pacts were signed. This inter-operatability structure allowed the US to craft new regional alliances – such as the Indo-Pacific Strategy – to yoke countries through military arrangements as well as trade and aid deals to US power projections. Finally, the huge military technology advances, including the use of drones, provide the US with a total global footprint. Through a programme called Prompt Global Strike (PGS), the US military hopes to be able to strike any part of the world with a precision-guided conventional weapon within one hour.

Keep in mind also (this is extremely relevant) that there is already a precedent for NATO wiggling out of any post-war investigation into its actions. This precedent was set in 2011 and 2012 with the destruction of Libya:

In 2011, the United States and France whipped the world into a frenzy about Muammar Qaddafi and the possibility of genocide in Libya. There was no evidence of any such danger; Saudi news outlets became the source for the Western press. It was this frenzy that allowed the United States and France to get a UN resolution to attack Libya, which they did immediately. Part of the resolution demanded a post-conflict study of the war. Once the dust settled by 2012 – although the Libya war still continues by other means – the UN set up a Commission of Inquiry to study NATO’s actions in its bombing of Libya. This was a fairly straightforward action, with no ulterior motive behind the investigation. The Commission was tasked to look at the actions of all parties in the conflict that led to the decimation of Libya. NATO refused to cooperate with the inquiry. NATO’s legal advisor Peter Olson wrote to the UN that these ‘NATO incidents’ are not crimes of any kind. ‘We would accordingly request,’ he noted in his letter, ‘that in the event that the commission elects to include a discussion of NATO actions in Libya, its report clearly state that NATO did not deliberately target civilians and did not commit war crimes in Libya.’ In other words, that NATO get a free pass for its form of warfare. There was no liberal outrage at NATO’s refusal to cooperate, no howls from the establishment’s humanitarian champions. They simply assume that the imperialist bloc is innocent of any malevolent motive and that it cannot be seen to have deliberately targeted civilians or destroyed a nation. Even an investigation into such actions was not tolerable. This is the extent of the redecoration of colonialism.