No. they wanted it much more than Putin. Putin actually tried to join NATO in the early 00s. That wasn't the first time Russia tried to join NATO, either, but NATO always said "no" because the whole point of NATO was to encircle and push out socialist states in Europe. Once there were no more socialist states in Europe, the point was to suppress and encircle former socialist states. The leaders before Putin, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin, literally destroyed the USSR, dissolved the warsaw pact, and privatized the Russian economy in exchange for no more NATO expansion. The Russians have compromised time and time again and gotten nothing in return. Gorbachev was promised this. His mistake was trusting the west. NATO kept expanding anyway. Because the fascist sociopathic capitalist west do not keep promises. They capitalize on moments of humility and compromise, which is viewed by their zero sum worldview as "weakness." NATO expanded into Czechia, Poland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria since 1999. The former soviet nations have slowly been chipped away by NATO despite popular dissatisfaction with NATO expansion in these countries. Bourgeois capitalist leadership in each of these countries decide on NATO partnerships, joint combat exercises, and submission to US military interoperable organizational structure, all against the wishes of the workers. And all of this is done without any popular consent, because it is considered a matter of "national security." The original purpose of NATO was to combat so-called "soviet aggression" in a time immediately after WW2, when the USSR had lost 25 million people and 1/3 of its industrial capacity, and was in no position to do any kind of expansionism. They were trying to rebuild. The US used the Marshall Plan to inject private capital into the European countries destroyed by WW2. The USA gave Germany way more money to rebuild than they gave the USSR, and the USSR declined to take the money anyway, knowing it would be used to push for privatization of the Soviet Economy. The USA rehabilitated nazis, brought high-ranking nazis like Adolf Heusinger and Hans Spiedel into high-ranking positions in the NATO hierarchy, brought west Germany into NATO, and pivoted West Germany's priorities from denazification to privatization and postwar recovery. All of this very deliberate rehabilitation was called an "economic miracle" even though it was nothing more than the richest country in the world injecting money directly into a defeated fascist power. The United States then brought Turkey into NATO, and stationed missiles in Turkey. The response to this was the creation of the Warsaw pact and the placement of missiles in Cuba. Cuba had its own organic revolution, though, and was not a soviet coup. They simply accepted Soviet help in the face of US aggression (bay of pigs, sanctions against cuban sugar, etc.). That's the difference. The USSR supported organic socialist revolutions, while the USA bankrolled fascist reactionaries inorganically. The USA started the cold war with the implementation of the Truman doctrine and the creation of NATO. And the USA has taken several hostile actions over the past 80 years to encircle, dissolve, coup, privatize, and destroy every god damned socialist project on the face of this planet and people who think history started a month ago imagine Putin (who wouldn't even be in power if it weren't for the USA's actions) somehow wants this war more than the USA? Ukraine was threatening to join NATO, something that the Russians were promised wouldn't happen. And the Ukrainian population prior to this year weren't exactly on board with this either. It took years of US-backed ethnic cleansing to remove the portions of the Ukrainian population resistant to NATO expansion.