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Trump has a history of dealing extremely generously with Putin and taking him at his word. If Putin or his representatives told him it was really Ukraine's fault, I would expect Trump to repeat that. It's probably not helping that Zelenskyy recently pointed this out, since Trump is notoriously fragile.
The other half of this is that Trump has the mind of a thug. When the powerful threaten you, you make concessions. If you don't, it's your fault for whatever happens.
It depends on how you see the recent history of Ukraine.
First of all, Ukraine (with generous help from the West) had a color revolution in 2014. This was eventually to lead to Zelensky taking power in Ukraine. This leads to Ukraine becoming much more friendly to the West, and petitioning and working toward membership in the EU and protection from NATO. That’s a big shift from Ukraine as before it had a Russian friendly government and was aligned to Russian interests.
If you uncritically accept Russia's position that they have the right to dominate Ukraine, then the Ukrainians did start it by not applying their tongues to Russian boots with sufficient vigor. However, I refer you to my remark about thuggish worldviews. Russia has no more right to demand subservience from Ukraine than the US does from Canada or Mexico.
It's hard to see how a change of government in a neighboring country justifies invading them (twice!) and engaging in naked land grabs.
What exactly does this mean? The "Euromaiden was fake/astroturf" position runs aground on the absolutely massive, cross-spectrum popular participation.
And yet the United States has a long, long history of demanding subservience from both:
•Invading Canada twice in 1777 and 1813 for not sufficiently supporting the American revolutionary project
•Sponsoring and funding a breakaway republic from Mexico in 1836, then officially recognizing that breakaway republic
•Launching a Special Military Operation against Mexico in 1848 and extracting massive territorial concessions because Mexico tried to destroy that breakaway republic
•Threatening to invade Canada in 1862 because their mother-state was providing aid to America’s own attempted breakaway republic
•Allowing foreign insurgents to stage in Minnesota and perpetrate multiple massive cross-border terrorist attacks into Canada between 1866 and 1871 resulting in hundreds of deaths
•Invading Mexico in 1913 to try to rendition a high value target that perpetrated a cross-border terrorist attack against the US
•Seizing the port of Veracruz in Mexico in 1912 to ensure access by military shipping
•Stationing numerous troops and military facilities in Canada
•Extracting trade concessions from both Canada and Mexico
And? Leaving aside some of the dodgy specifics herein, it would be pretty brazen to suggest that, e.g. Canada was really at fault for the Fenian Raids. If the point is merely that sometimes powerful nations bully weaker ones, no one was contesting that.
The point is that powerful nations take an interest in the behaviour of their neighbours, especially when those neighbours are aligning themselves with rival nations, and act accordingly. America is no exception. See e.g. Bay of Pigs, or the medieval friction between England and the Scots (because the latter often allied with France).
America has lately been able to act as though it would never do this only because it's had no major rivals for 30 years and its neighbouring nations are thoroughly cowed. If Mexico or Canada start entertaining an alliance with China, perhaps involving the stationing of Chinese troops, America will change its tune VERY quickly.
I reiterate: And?
The problem with the thug's worldview is that they create the world they think they are merely describing. Nobody in Eastern Europe would be clamoring for an alliance with Uncle Sam if not for Russia's own behavior.
And therefore American politicians are hypocrites (wittingly or not) when they say that large countries like Russia have no right to exert influence on their neighbours.
If they believe the same for America (which I doubt, they’ve never been shy about steering their
vassalsallies away from getting involved with geopolitical rivals, see Nord Stream 2) it is because they are the proverbial man in a gated community patrolled by police who believes that nobody has the right to self-defence.Now, it may be that you personally would strongly oppose any such behaviour by America as strongly as you oppose it when done by Russia. But I don’t think many Americans would, and I certainly don’t think America’s government would.
Personally, as an Englishman I would vote for taking action should Ireland or a hypothetical independent Scotland start discussing alliance with enemy nations for example. Letting yourself be put into a position of weakness just because nobody has actually used it against you yet is stupid. So I can hardly order that nobody else does so. Of course, one hopes it never comes to that, but part of making sure it doesn’t is that everyone has to take care not to tread on each others’ toes.
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