They are bourgeois states but not all aggression between bourgeois states is automatically imperialist or unjustified. In this case, it’s pretty much NATO/UK/EU who are the true aggressors after absorbing the entire central eastern European corridor through which Russia has been invaded several times the past few centuries. All Russian state forms from the imperial to the Soviet to the bourgeois national would react in the same way against this slow development.

Ukrainian nationalism as some sort of completely benign and universal matter among all Ukrainians and some kind of right to the ethnic and national self-determination of the country are views of ignorant westerners who have no idea about the lack of uniformity as far as identities are concerned. Ethnically, Ukrainians, Russians and Georgians are all basically one common cultural group of people with various flavors but I doubt anyone in the West believed that the cossacks aren’t Russian prior to 2022. It’s basically a civil war and the northwestern Ukrainian nationalists and descendants of Bandera have had almost an entire century of planning to Ukrainianize Ukraine from their own supposedly superior perspective of having some weird half-Germanic ancestry which they don’t believe they share with “Russo-Mongols”, “Pontics”, “Mediterraneans” and other racial science junk. They’ve had a policy of ethnic cleansing before WWII and they’re far more of a foreign element than Russian-speaking Ukrainians. The modern appearance of strong nationalist movements in the former eastern bloc is never, ever, ever an innocent development.