Xi and others are reassessing things and since Russia is so weak their ambitions might lay in that direction towards the central republics in Asia. There are only two of them that gets them to Iran and one of them and their neighbors have lot's of oil and other goodies. China doesn't want to expand territory, it wants control and trade, using mostly soft power like America does, but it will have the military power in it's own back yard.
Taiwan is not expansion from their POV, it's reclaiming Chinese territory, however with the UN the people living there decide that. It will be like that in Ukraine too, nobody will tell the people living there who and what they are, they decide that for themselves in UN supervised referendums, in Donbass, Crimea and Kaliningrad on the Baltic. Vlad does not decide these things, the people living there do with referendums and now by beating the shit out of his army to keep their freedom. It's a simple straight forward war, a real black and white situation of right vs wrong, that makes it so much easier to do the right thing.