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It is talking point targeted at people who do know American history and who do criticize those actions as bad - but who never really cared about Russian or Easter European history at all.Guilty as charged. I've never particularly focused on understanding Russia, apart from family stories about Russian occupation after WWII before they got out of East Germany to the West and ultimately the US (watching The Lives of Others is like the life I missed). So that talking point is targeted at people like me. And the points do resonate with me somewhat, since I do consider USG an empire. An economic empire that mostly keeps its territories in line through market effects and treaties, fundamentally nicer than an army-first directly-commanded empire of old, but still an empire.
> You can not legitimately analyze a any state or group of people without engaging with those.
I don't disagree, however earnestly engaging with those is a lot of work to sift through various opinions. What we're dealing with here is an ongoing torrent of superficial analysis that destroys consensus truth. So while I think most experts on Russia would seemingly agree with your analysis, a propagandist can stand up an equally-plausible expert that says the exact opposite. Without any social proof (eg in-depth study of Russia in school or independently), there's little way for an individual to sort through that muck. Enter relativism.
> It is fundamentally absurd way to interpret Russia even in theoretical alternate reality where Russia did not tried to commit genocide in Ukraine
Sure, but that wouldn't stop such analysis from carrying the day with many people. In order to eliminate relativism, one either needs to become an expert in the field (what I described above, impractical for most), or one needs to find objective points that can't be relativized away in our postmodern media environment. The blatant mass slaughter of civilians is such a touchstone - it puts all of Russia's countervailing narratives in stark relief.