Living in a world that cannot change is meaningless
If communism or any other "utopia" is impossible, then why feed the eternal trouble machine by creating new generations?

Putin, in principle, is an ordinary bourgeois person
Not a fascist, not a dictator, not a new Stalin, not a socialist, not a nationalist, and not a fact that he is a patriot. Personally, for example, I had serious fears that he would leave the Donbass to be torn to pieces by "respected Western partners", and at some point mentally said goodbye to those republics as if they were dead.
IMHO, he just wants to sit on the throne and have money come in steadily. Paraphrasing one article from VKontakte, this is the logic of the pipe: oil should flow without problems. It is not for nothing that one of the main slogans, as it were, was the word "Stability!", which has become a meme.

SMO is not an unjustified war of aggression
Why did the Ukrainian side reject the Minsk agreements and why did they talk about the "Croatian scenario"? Those agreements included the return of the rebel territories to the Ukrainian Republic! Why didn't they sit on their ass straight? Would their hands fall off if they gave limited autonomy to "subsidized regions"?

Why did the West spit on Putin's "red lines"? Was he demanding something impossible, or at least disadvantageous for the West?

The SMO looks like a national liberation action, conducted contrary to the general line of the Russian Federation.
Let's remember one more old slogan: "If only there was no war".

As for the Crimea, it was not imperialism, since then there were not even prospects for making a profit, and taking land without economic sense is not imperialism, but strategic point protection. They did not want to take Donbass and Kharkov, here is an example of news from those days.