If they didn't start the war, Ukraine would be NATO-soil and the USA could destroy Russia easily. They had to fight.
Maybe, but the Baltics are already NATO members, and they are right next to St. Petersburg. If the NATO countries wanted to, they could put nukes there and have them closer to both it and Moscow than they could've been if put in Ukraine.
Not to mention that distance barely matters when it comes to nukes anyway. If they get fired from the other side of the world, you do get a few hours more, but that's it, you're still getting destroyed either way.
Also, nuclear subs make which countries host nukes irrelevant as well. Even if Ukraine itself doesn't host NATO nukes, or the Baltics don't, the Americans could simply park their subs right by their shores and strike the Russians pretty much as quickly as they would've if those missiles were in those countries themselves.
What I was getting at in my comment was, although it's easy to understand why Russians wanted to keep hegemony over the countries near to them and dominate them, they chose a completely wrong way to do so. What they
should have done was to invest their wealth into diversifying their economy and modernizing their country, similarly to what China does. Instead, what they did was endlessly screaming that over a dozen or so countries need to be their vassals pretty much just because, offering nothing in return. As a result, they simply got told to fuck off over and over again, while their former vassals outpaced them in terms of wealth, income, and technology. Now, they are trying to keep control of their neighbourhood by military force. Understandable, but ultimately just a sad result of a doomed strategy.