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I think that almost nobody in Western Europe, in their heart of hearts, really believes that Europe will fall to Putin if he manages to turn Ukraine into Belarus 2.0.
If his special military operation had gone differently, Europe would not have mounted a counter-attack to free Ukraine. The preferred phrasing is "Europe is willing to defend Ukraine to the last Ukrainian soldier".
From a point of view of maintaining the rule based international order, it makes sense to punish defectors like Putin as long as it is costing us little (compared to WW3) to do so. (Yes, we did let him get away with Chechnya, but that is his backyard, while Ukraine is his front yard. The IRBO states very clearly that the only country which is supposed to get away with intervening where-ever they like is the US.)
From the point of depleting the stockpiles of weapons and recruits of a potential adversary, supporting Ukraine is likewise great. Perhaps Putin is genuinely uninterested in extending his sphere of influence over Eastern Europe and just wants to control what he considers Russia, just like it would have been possible that Hitler only wanted control of the territories with a German majority in Austria and the Sudetenland, but either is hard to know beforehand without being able to read both his mind and the mind of his successors.
If Putin instead had tried his regime change op in Poland, the European reaction would have been on quite a different level, because Poland is NATO. My guess is that at least 80% of the NATO countries would be willing to send troops to their death in Poland, and the ones who do not will functionally quit NATO. Article 5 is a promise, and if you defect from that promise, then NATO is dead and Putin is free to attack European countries one by one. (Of course, given what we saw in Ukraine, it seems unlikely that he would win the war for Poland against European forces even without US support, but that just makes it that much easier to commit to fight.)
With regard to guaranteeing what remains of Ukraine, the question for me is if it would make sense to allow whatever will be left of Ukraine into NATO. There are quite a few pros and cons to that. On the one hand, Ukraine is the one country which has serious combat experience fighting Russia, and they are indeed positioned well to strike for Moscow, so a NATO Ukraine would force Russia to deploy a lot of defensive troops in that area if she ever becomes serious about starting the next world war. On the other hand, Russia seems to have a bee in her bonnet about getting Ukraine heim ins Reich, and if there is a 10% chance that Ukraine in NATO will lead to global thermonuclear war, then that is not worth it in expected QALYs or from a European geostrategic point of view.
It also states in smaller letters that if you're a sufficiently big and important country, 'human rights' are an optional part of dealing with secession crises(which is what Chechnya was).
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