What was unique about fascism was the ethnic superiority and the unifying totalitarianism where all public/private resources are aimed at national goals. Russia is too multiethnic for the former and too disorganized for the latter.
> Rally around the flag, point to the external enemy, it's all pre-industrial, fascists didn't invent it.
Flags were far less common or standardised in pre-industrial societies. People didn't fight for their lord or king because of propaganda about an external enemy (with the possible exception of the crusades), but simply because their lord or king wanted to go to war and that was their place in the world.
> What was unique about fascism was the ethnic superiority
That too existed before. There were many places in the Middle Ages where Jews had reduced rights, for example. It's the kind of division that fascism loves to build on.
> unifying totalitarianism where all public/private resources are aimed at national goals.
That's more like it. More specifically, the extreme nationalism and elevating those national goals to some higher ideal and inevitable necessity. And that's something Russia definitely does. Or tries. You're right that they're not very effective at it, but it is definitely how Putin talks, and how the fascist ideologues he relies on, talk.
Yes they are. You're engaging in binary thinking here. These demagogical patterns that Umberto Eco describes were in The Iliad, they've been tropes as long as we've had writing at least, probably longer.
First russians did when they occupied some territory of Ukraine is to remove and prohibit Ukranian language.
It is as similar to Nazi as could be except the name. Their ideology is to slowly remove any nation russia controls and claim them to be russians. Rise children as russians and kill nation if it doesn’t obey. Literally.
We can argue if it’s new form of Nazi or not but perhaps it’s much worse.