You make the mistake of bi-polar thinking.
Their elections started going towards pro-Russian rather than pro-EU candidates so they responded by clamping down on anything Russian even to a degree banning the use of the language, then when the ethnically Russians started resisting the violence reached a point where the military was shelling Russian areas which caused the reactive violence from the Russians to escalate and eventually Russia was pulled into what had since at least 2014 been a civil war no one was yet paying attention to.
There does not have to be a public policy for anything, verbal orders are enough for something to be practical policy. The first step of ethnic cleansing if you are not prepared to do outright genocide is to eliminate the language and replace the souls of the people with a new one in your own image by forcing your language on them. There is a difference between promoting a language and attempting to eradicate another, even if they did not try to do this it was interpreted by the Russian Ukrainians as such. And I speak as someone who's great grandparents went through the same process where the then overlord attempted to replace their language in order to replace their identity.... and the current overlord is using low intensity strategies to currently do it but at least this one is more incompetent than the previous one and it too will fail.
There is a lot of he said she said here but the fact is Russia could never have gotten involved if Ukraine did not overstep and target civilians in some way. The invasion was merely the tail end of a decade long process. Yes you can make the argument that more Russians have died because of the war but you come up against arguments that they either merely sped up the process and that the Ukrainians are to blame in some way or another.... IMO though the Russians are simply guilty of stubborn incompetence here where they intended for a police action which spiraled into a war because of Western interference and they are simply too caught in the grip of history to admit they are not in full control. They don't in their minds have any way out other than through.... and they will blame Ukraine (with a degree of truth) for the excess deaths. I might be in ignorance about something but it stuns me that they did not do mass evacuations of the disputed areas unless they want to use them as human shields or something. It just seems blatantly stupid to still do it this way.
You make the mistake of thinking this is perceived as a war on Ukraine when it's a defensive war against the Western powers which seek to make Russia a client state. This is true both on the ground and in leadership... they don't even see Ukraine as the real enemy they are fighting it's just a puppet in the second phase of the cold war or cold war 2.0... and this is quite obviously true. This is not about a mere 10 years of humiliation for the Russians but about a century of humiliation the same way as it is for China only there it's multiple centuries they are sore about.... it's not about either the land or the resources, that's just a very welcome bonus. It does not help though that the age old pattern of the Slavs wanting to separate from the Russians with the Russians wanting to re-integrate them is repeating, this is something that has been going on for many centuries of to and fro. Ukraine is a kind of schizophrenic remnant of the original rulers of what is now Russia in many ways.
The Jew thing is a red herring. All that is needed for Nazism is any kind of National Socialism (Socialism being the state being in control of society at a granular level) combined with a "foreign" boogyman within your borders on which you can blame everything wrong with the world.... simple. Jews just happened to be the one the Germans blamed. There is nothing stopping Jews from being Nazi's.... in their case their boogeyman is the Arabs. In the case of Ukraine the boogeyman is the Russians.
It didn't, it posed a thread to Russians in Ukraine. The same justification incidentally that led to the war of Texan independence which drew American military aid. The moment Ukraine took the bait and made it about fighting the ethnically Russian they gave Russia a Cassius Belli on a silver platter.
The mistake is to place moral weight on the invasion as if it happened in isolation or even is the most important part of the story. Morals have nothing to do with it other than as propaganda.
No I never said Ukraine is a Nazi state, it has Nazi elements it uses to it's advantage.... or did at least until it backfired.
Ukraine is a corrupt sh-hole where the most powerful or wealthy people get their own way and has been spiraling into depravity imported from the West for a long time now.... just as my own country has incidentally. This has nothing to do with ideology it's about influence and usefulness. I don't hate them, I pity them, I know what they did to themselves because I live it first hand only in a different way. It's about mafia factions vying for turf while having political fronts representing them in government... or the political factions having crime syndicates greasing their wheels. Ukraine is not so much a pet project as a convenient proxy and slush fund for wealthy Western politicians.... I dunno if the biolabs thing has any validity but if true yes there is that threat too.... what would your country do if it believed a hostile force operated biolabs on it's border?
As for the supposed ideologies.... in the West the Liberals are not actually Liberal but by now open Leftists and the Libertarians are crypto fascists who show their true colours as soon as you present half a threat to them.... no one actually is what they pretend to be.
