I mostly agree with your points, but even the article title very clearly says ‘could’.

Russia had been encroaching on Ukrainian borders for years before launching their full invasion, and I’m not aware of similar actions against other European nations. It may be fearmongering, but unifying and strengthening NATO is in an important step to take to prevent Putin from going even further. He is heading towards his latter years now, and he seems to like the idea of restoring the ‘glory’ of the USSR and showing the West how big and stronk Russia is.

Additionally, in a larger-scale war with other, better armed European nations, Russia might not hold back on using their nukes this time round.

Figure 1. Association between factuality score adjusted by country mean, parties’ left-right ideology (right), and populism (middle), and government participation (left) with 95% confidence intervals.

I think this means that the y axis represents the deviation from the mean score, not the actual ‘factuality score’.