Sorry if the question sounds a little broad, but I'm interested in learning more about statements that were made by a commenter in another subreddit:
In the past, even under Putin, Russia has tried to join and play nice with the west. The US and UK always block them. [...]
the US made Russia the problem it is today from the fall of the soviet union in an attempt to get American capital in control of privatized Russian resources to start (and to create domestic political climates that allowed it to attack labor and education) [...]
Putin requested to negotiate a membership in NATO at least a couple times in the first few years of being in power [...]
try googling "Russia shock doctrine" and you should get results that explain how the US created the new Russian oligarchy similar to how we created Pinochet [...]
the CIA [...] [has caused] death tolls directly or indirectly in the 10s of millions
Is anyone here able to add some color to these claims and clarify what the facts of the situation are?
The US generally and the CIA specifically did not create or implement shock therapy in the post-Soviet USSR, nor did it create the Russian oligarchs, nor did American capital come to control resources in Russia (those local oligarchs did, and Russia has long been considered a high-risk place for international corporations to do business even before the sanctions and pullout this year).
The US also actually preferred the Soviet Union to continue and not break up in 1991 (it certainly preferred Gorbachev over Yeltsin). This went up to the point where George H.W. Bush even gave a live speech to the Ukrainian legislature and asked them to not vote for independence from the USSR. The switch to backing Yeltsin was mostly because of the swift change in politics in Moscow after the August 1991 coup attempt.
I wrote more on what US perceptions of and policies towards the USSR were like here.
You can find more about why the post-Soviet economic transition for Russia was so rough here, and why its GDP declined so much in the 1990s here. I also wrote why the US didn't set up a "Marshall Plan 2.0" here.
u/jbdyer has a great answer as to where the Russian oligarchs came from.
As for the discussion around what was and what was not promised in post-1991 NATO expansion, you might want to check out these comments by u/jbdyer and u/soviet_ghosts in the February Ukraine Megathread.