In general, people that claim to not buy the "it's NATO's fault" narrative, and instead argue that Russia must be healed of some "imperial" delusion are quite clueless. I saw an article recently, by a historian I had formerly respected - Timothy Snyder - that argued that Russia will "win by losing", since only by losing can Russia become a normal country and develop prosperously. I'm sure this would win many plaudits from the local Russophobe brigade, but this would be completely myopic since it would be your Eastern European countries that would suffer the most from a Russian defeat.
Russia is not Britain or France, or some other former empire ruling faraway peoples across the sea. We can't just curl up in our little sh!thole of a home, and whistfully exclaim "oh that was nice while it lasted". Russia IS empire. It's a foundational aspect of how we conceive of ourselves as a people. Though it may have been built around an ethnic Russian core, Orthodoxy, and Autocracy, our identity is also intrinsically tied to every constituent part which it digested during its expansion (yes, that includes the Horde). There is no "real Russia" and "outer Russia", as there was for the English and the French. There is nothing for us to fall back on. Ukraine is as much a part of our collective memory as Appalachia is to America. Our defeat in this war, will lead to an implosion that almost certainly will spill over our borders, and likely consume the entire planet - for decades. People will look back, and wonder how we let it fester to such a point, when the root cause was trivial in a global context - whether or not our former constituent part should be able to join a rival military alliance.