No, I’m saying Russia isn’t imperialist, period. You’re redefining imperialism from a concrete, analyzed, material system into a vibe, an emotion, a gut-feeling, because you want Russia to be evil. That’s why you try to redefine it as something incredibly particular and formless, impossible to definitively nail down, but the problem there is that if we can’t nail it down, then we can’t analyze it.

At the end of the day, Russia is not getting wealthy off the backs of the global south. The west is, and Russia is working against that system. It may be for its own self-interest, sure, but fighting imperialism does not make a country imperialist. And yes, Putin isn’t a socialist. He’s a nationalist, over capitalist country that is not at the imperialist stage like the west is.

This is all good-faith on my part. The problem here is that you’re defining good-faith by how much it coheres to your vibes-based worldview, which is obviously going to run counter to materialist analysis.