Russian imperialism has been around before the US was a country. The USSR was a drop in its history and a brief interruption at most. Russia absolutely has imperial ambitions and has material interests in both Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe, that it considers in its “sphere of influence”. Subjugation and extraction is absolutely their goal. Russia has only gone to war in a couple of small regions because that is its current capacity. It has been working heavily on the propaganda front in Eastern Europe for decades, and is incredibly influential in governments and organized crime there. And any kind of war is by definition worsening peoples conditions.
You can have multiple empires viying for power and influence, and Russia absolutely is one of them.
The USSR was a drop in its history and a brief interruption at most.
80 years? I’d hardly call that a drop. Three generations jam packed with industrial, social, and geopolitical change in a region running the length of the world’s largest continent. And this, right next door to another global superstate going through a similar metamorphosis.
You can complain that the Russians have backpeddled a bit from their 1950s/60s heyday. But we’re long past the point of return for the nation. Suggesting this is a “brief interruption” is on par with claiming the USA represents a temporary spat interrupting the millenia-long reign of the continent’s native peoples, rather than an inflection point in the continent’s history.
Unfortunately, due to the way history works, we tend to forget or ignore the amount of changes in previous eras. And the weight of history does create its momentum. The USSR was a radical change from everything before, but unfortunately it failed and now we are seeing a lot of tendencies from the past reeemerge and somehow adapt to the new conditions.
The settler colonizers have been around here for several centuries now, so it is definitely not on par.
