I am in no way defending their conduct but they did simply ask for a firm No NATO in Ukraine and they were rebuffed before he 2022 invasion and during initial post invasion negotiations.
They absolutely positively did not. They wanted to roll back of NATO membership as a start and were uninterested when Ukraine was trying to avert the possibility of a larger scale invasion (not to mention when Russia violated both Minsk treaties then pretended it didn't apply to them).
Russia knew that Ukraine had little chance of getting into NATO in early 2022 and wasn't even persuing it after the revolution of dignity before the 2014 invasion
