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Why be fearful? What exactly is the fear?
If you are fearful, how does invading Ukraine help? It only makes NATO stronger. Is Russia more secure now?
A military alliance set up specifically to contrast you comes closer and closer to your borders while taking over your sphere of influence and completely ignoring your voicing of concerns. Would US be ok with Mexico or Canada seeking closer military ties with China? Hell, let's not even go that far. What if China starts forming military partnerships with SK or Japan, how would US react? You know the answer.
It doesn't. I have multiple theories why that happened, but I'm too lazy to write out a full thesis. In short: It was getting clear Ukraine is not gonna budge on staying neutral (not abiding by Minsk agreements, pro-peace politicians in Ukraine being pressured by pro-war factions to not back down, US getting more involved into Donbas conflict as time went on), so it was a now or never situation for Putin if he wanted to hold any influence over countries around Russia's borders. I doubt the war we have now was planned - analysts, even Western ones, didn't predict Ukraine would hold off that long. Also think Putin didn't expect EU to get as involved as it did. US's involvement was expected, but it wouldn't be able to do much if Germany or France lobbied against involvement within EU.
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One of the many justified fears could have been of something like what is happening right now: Russia feels compelled to enforce its interests militarily in a third country, but NATO uses its proximity to prevent it from doing so (by backing said country with equipment and intel, easily conveyed across shared borders and gathered with AWACS with range measured in the hundreds of kilometres).
If Ukraine had actually joined NATO, this would obviously have been even worse: Russia clearly has interests in Ukraine (ranging from trade access, which was a core contention behind the 2014 revolution, via transit of petroleum products to Western Europe, where Ukraine stealing some portion was an issue decades before that, to the political implications of having a large neighbouring russophone country that might provide a safe harbour to opposition and subversives), which it would then have become impossible to enforce.
They presumably didn't invade expecting to fail this hard. Had they won, at least Western commentators seemed to have been of the opinion that NATO would have been weakened (as its Eastern fringe would be more incentivised to hedge its bets between the US and Russia).
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