All NATO had to do was to not keep expanding east the way NATO promised to do when USSR dissolved. Nothing more complicated than that. Super easy... barely an inconvenience. So easy even a caveman could do it.

Even Stoltenberg openly admits that NATO expansion was what caused the war:

Then lastly on Sweden. First of all, it is historic that now Finland is member of the Alliance. And we have to remember the background. The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn't sign that.

The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.

Your shithole country wanting to be the world hegemon is why the war is happening. The war will end once your deplorable regime decides to abandon Ukraine like a used condom, and we're already seeing signs that this is happening. You fuckers used the people of Ukraine in an idiotic ploy to try and weaken Russia somehow. This scheme was even openly explained by RAND in this paper. Now we see the consequences of that.