You have nothing to teach me about the sins of America's often criminal empire, since I saw them up close in L.A. in 1983-86 when I worked as a bilingual volunteer interviewing Central American refugees and taking them to the Canadian consulate to get asylum: https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/post-cards-from-the-border-refugee-crisis-e152c3a7e96c

It takes a lot to make the American empire look like the good guy, but once or twice a century a truly genocidal imperialist like Putin comes along and manages to do so.

You're in category A or B of Russian genocide apologists, as defined here:

https://medium.com/illumination-curated/travels-in-the-empire-of-whataboutistan-fcac568267cb

Russophobia: I started studying Russian history at Georgetown in 1972, read literally hundreds of books of Russian history and literature that you'll never see, married a half-Russian, half-Polish woman in Latvia, speak conversational Russian, have been to Russia four times in 2015-17, worked with Russian software developers for two years and have more than 150 Russian language letters from my grandmother in Vinnitsya to my grandfather in Brooklyn written between 1913 and 1917, which my wife and I are translating. So ditch the Russophobia nonsense.

The flawed democracy that is the often criminal American empire at least has to pay lip service to a set of constitutional values. This is what it has that Russia never will:

Jack Smith, Fani Willis, Tanya Shutkan, Adam Schiff, Jamie Raskin, Liz Cheney (execrable politics and voting record, but she stood up to Musso-mini Trump), Mitt Romney (as with Cheney). In Russia you'd be in the gulag.

If you prefer Lavrov the Liar and Medvedev, I'll pay for your one way ticket to Moscow or St. Petersburg to sample what it's like to live enserfed in a neo-feudal kleptocracy.

Any doubts about the genocidal essence of Russia's land-based colonial empire built over half a millenium of subjugating 100+ indigenous peoples from Karelia to Yakutia? Read here: https://www.justsecurity.org/81789/russias-eliminationist-rhetoric-against-ukraine-a-collection/

Or watch Russian TV: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=russian+media+monitor

Ask the Baltics, Finns, Swedes, Germans, Poles, Slovaks, Czechs, Romanians, Bulgarians,Norwegians and Turks if they prefer to partner with the nearby bully, Russia's openly genocidal authoritarian kleptocracy, or the more distant bully. The verdict is already in. The idea that all these peoples who have experienced Russian aggression might prefer Russia's spurious anti-western crusade for "traditional values" against gays, trans and globalists is laughable useful idiocy, to use KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov's term.