The article gives examples of both. On the one side, "overlooked", because the English language academia covering the region has inherited the russian language lies - like, the lie that before russia arrived, ukrainians were dull Cossacks who ate grass and slept under the open sky. From the article -

As Professor Susan Smith-Peter recently commented: “As scholars of Russia, we need to undertake a searching moral inventory to see the ways in which we have taken the Russian state’s point of view as a default. Have we in any way taken part in the glorification of the Russian state that Putin has taken to a pathological extreme? Has our field participated in casting Ukraine as a state without history in our own way?“

The article also gives ways that USA officials were directly propping up, and in favor of, maintaining russian imperialism.

This is how late Professor Mark von Hagen recalled in 2016 the political atmosphere back then: “Again, George Bush … was defending Gorbachev until the very last possible moment because he and the United States government at that level, with a few dissenting voices, wanted to keep the Soviet Union together because they were so afraid of the kind of crazy, fascist nationalism that they thought the Ukrainians represented.”

The article is worth a read in my opinion, if you haven't already