Regarding the 2nd point I just cannot see it.
Whilst I do admit that the US loves their devious little diplomatic plays I doubt Ukraine would have joined NATO. Take Sweden as an example to showcase how hard it actually is for a country to join the alliance if one country doesn't play the game. And pre-war Ukraine would likely have faced backlash by more than just one country.
Even during the war when public support in the west for Ukraine was at it's peak, when asked about if he could concretize what safety guarantees the G7 countries could give to a post-war Ukraine, German chancellor Olaf Scholz just replied: "Yes, I could..." and refused to elaborate further.
And French president Macron once considered NATO as a whole to be "brain dead" and wanted to shift it's focus away from it. (A view I shared back then)
And now, a few years later NATO is - even by a lot of people who once opposed it - regarded as a safety guarantee with Finland and Sweden joining. So if the plan was to prevent an aggressive NATO expansion towards Russia's borders that plan failed miserably and at the cost of thousands of civilians and soldiers, the world economics and the environment.
Only the arms industry profits now.