Finland is a small country, and it joined NATO without Russia so much as flinching. Ukraine is nothing like small. It's bigger than France, for instance, with almost 50M people. Attacking it was just plain madness.
The anomaly was that they decided to fight back. And Russia's Army was not what it was, and they didn't go in with enough for a proper fight, yada yada.
> Attacking it was just plain madness.
I get why Putin did it. You don’t want Ukraine to become a porcupine like Taiwan or some de facto NATO state. You have to also remember that this was also a de-Nazification operation, there a lot of Nazis in Ukrainian uniform [1].
> Ukraine is nothing like small.
I said smaller.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/world/europe/nazi-symbols...