Instigated is maybe too strong a word, but certainly at least provoked.
It's a testament to the awesome power of US propaganda that you can't throw a stone in Texas without hitting a house flying the Ukrainian flag, but almost no one actually knows the history and circumstances leading up to the war.
I think these two pieces provide some good background:
All the supposed "provocations" boil down to Ukraine doing whatever it can to avoid becoming a Russian colony again - which in Russian agitprop parlance is euphemistically termed "infringing on Russian geopolitical interests" or similar. There's no equivalence between the sides in Ukraine at all, even if US is also an empire and pursues its own imperial goals elsewhere.
Yanukovych was removed by the Ukrainian parliament on a vote of 328–0 out of 450 members. Russia doesn't have a right to be upset that Ukraine kicked out a corrupt puppet.
As for NATO expanding east, Russia has something of a grievance there but the U.S. and NATO should never have relegated some of the former Soviet states to the status of "buffer regions" in perpetuity in the first place. Those countries have the right to self-determination and security just like anyone else.
Not even Putin is dumb enough to think that NATO presents a threat to Russia, and even he could have seen the obvious effect that an invasion would have of galvanizing the alliance.
The threat to his regime and its legitimacy is to have a democratic neighbor with russian speakers who live better lives, in what is a former colonial subject of the glorious russian empires.
NATO does make a great bogeyman though for internal audiences, to shift attention away from the futures they are deprived of by dictatorship.
It's a testament to the awesome power of US propaganda that you can't throw a stone in Texas without hitting a house flying the Ukrainian flag, but almost no one actually knows the history and circumstances leading up to the war.
I think these two pieces provide some good background:
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/the-war-in-ukraine-was-...
https://archive.is/uvm3W