As Ukrainian, I can say that you don’t understand anything.
Some data points might be correct, but you have not enough data to connect the dots, so you make wrong conclusions.
Russia was threatening with invading Ukraine right from the beginning of its recent independence.
There were two large schools of thoughts how to deal with it:
1) try to “go around rain drops” by not provoking Russia but simultaneously to not give up sovereignty
2) move as fast as possible and seek protection from NATO like baltics and other eastern europeans.
When Russia starts regaining power internally, it became much harder to “go around raindrops”, as russia start to perform FSB style operation to discredit Ukraine in the west and to enforce its will on the inside.
Kravchuk (2nd president), falls the victim of that when Ukraine was accused of selling weapons to counties under sanctions, which made him a pariah in the west.
Later he was accused of ordering of killing a journalist which made him a pariah on the inside.
Also it was time when Russia tried to make the first attempt of annexing Crimea by trying to get first island near it - (Tusla).
Kuchma was able to make some agreement with russia a relax the tensions.
Then russia decided that the next president have to be Yanukovych - a criminal with served jail time.
An opposed politician was Yuschenko, who was famous for his reforms on the national bank and was considered by the time a successful manager and politician.
What’s worse, Russia helped to rig the elections and later poison Yuschenko with dioxin.
This caused a first revolution.
Yuschinko understood very well what he was dealing with and saw the only salvation from NATO as the threats from Russia increased.
And so on, and so forth.
US was not in favor of Ukrainian independence for a very long time and never helped in any way, except for disarming. The first time US president arrived to Ukraine was to talk the parliament out of proclaiming independence.
Europe was always afraid of russia and very careful with Ukraine.
Russia was always threatening and tried to regain control over Ukraine - both politically, by sabotage, special operations and military.
Ukraine was looking for help and screaming that russia will attack sooner or later.
Ukraine consider itself to be part of Europe by values, and is fighting russia for more than a century already paying huge price.
NATO was considered the only way to finally stop this cycle, but with US withdrawing, it may seems that all of the struggle was in vain as Europe might not be capable to protect even itself.