I don't understand why you're still pursuing this argument when Kremlin has dropped the NATO pretext quite a long time ago. According to Putin[1], now it's a special operation to liberate Donbas from their Ukro-Nazi overlords. The Russian PR machine has recently been struggling to find better justifications to this pointless carbon copy of a 19th century colonial war.
As a result of this war, Finland and Sweden joined NATO, turning the Baltic Sea into NATO's internal waters, which isolates Kaliningrad and St Petersburg. Ukraine will sooner or later join it too. The whole western border from Sochi to Murmansk (except puppet state Belarus) will soon be in a mutual defence pact against further Russian aggression. So in this dimension, it's been a spectacular failure for Russia.
The argument of protecting Russians in Ukraine has become morbid at best, after Russia razed to the ground several major cities with large Russian populations, many of whom now lie in nameless mass graves. Daily missile attacks on civilians in eastern Ukraine, where disproportional number of Russians live, doesn't help the case either. After the spectacular counteroffensive, which expelled Russians from Kharkiv region, they have nothing left but threats of widening the war against civilians in pursuit of scorched-earth policy.
So what justifications of this war remain? What halftones are there to discuss? That maybe there still remain some undiscovered arguments in support of blowing up hospitals and power stations?
[1] https://twitter.com/DAlperovitch/status/1570808500053475331