You can not legitimately analyze a any state or group of people without engaging with those.
> that does not justify Russia's flipping the table and reverting to early 20th century style mechanized slaughter.
The "some truth" part in it is true only to the level of "yes, west done bad thing there". The claim that Russia would somehow behave much differently had Iraque not been invaded is not convincing at all. It is not just missing justifying power. It does not have explanatory power at all. It does not explain Russian return into authoritarian state over last 20 years.
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.
Disinformation, american "бдительный гражданин" (do look up the meaning, it might widen your horizons), is to speak of "genocide" perpetrated by russians in Ukraine.
As for your words regarding Dutch collaborateurs during WWII, yes, we had those, and we dealt with them, but you weren't there (and neither was I) so I don't see why you would even bring it up.
FWIW: I actually like lots of Russian people, but the way you guys govern your country really has to improve, this won't end well. Already you have moved yourself to 'pariah' status and I'm pretty sure it's possible to go lower still but why would you?
Relativism can be handy, helping you see biases and assumptions of your native culture, but you always needs to keep it subordinate to actual reality. The reality here is that Russia has aggressed beyond its borders [1] and is unequivocally committing genocide, at which point I have a hard time being concerned about the ways the West may have effectively hurt Russia's feelings and "made" them lash out. There is indeed a geopolitical game of economic empire that the US/EU have been succeeding at, but that does not justify Russia's flipping the table and reverting to early 20th century style mechanized slaughter.
[0] In fact continuing the tangent, the memetic points of the original article are quite applicable to Iraq. Basically USG forcibly spreading the memes of "democracy", "corporate sanctity", and of course "USD as world reserve currency". Witness the overwhelming popular support for attacking Iraq in 2003 that has now been seemingly memory-holed by its one-time supporters. In 2003, the need to attack Iraq was manifestly implicit based on everpresent memes, which have now been de-emphasized.
[1] We can examine the modern notion of the nation-state with fixed borders as itself being a modern-Western invention, but it's likely better described as a quality of the "centralized state" of the article. And pragmatically the concept seems to function as a reasonable Schelling point.