Nobody here is suggesting that Russia is helping African nations due to some altruistic reasons. They directly benefit from decolonialization and these nations not being under western domination. What you're doing is creating a false equivalence between what Russia is doing in Africa and what the west has done. It doesn't mean that Russia would've behaved differently if they had more resources, but the reality is that they do not have the means to colonize Africa. Yet they can help decolonize it, and they benefit from new trading partners resulting from that.

Imperialism would be Russia installing their own puppet regime, then plundering the resources of these nations. What's actually happening there is that Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso are nationalizing resources. https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/06/23/niger-to-nationalize-uranium-to-wrest-control-over-its-resource-from-france/

I really recommend you read the article I linked, if you haven't. It directly addresses the Russian Federation. Here's an excerpt from that section:

Russia lacks finance capital and division of the world's resources. It only has 4 of the top 100 corporations in the world and 6 of the top 500. 82% of Russian exports are raw materials, including 58% oil, 11% metal, and 6% food. In 2017, Russia imported $106.2 billion worth' of machine goods and only exported $12.8 billion. Russia does not have any of the top 100 corporations in terms of capital export, and most Russian capital export is capital flight to tax havens. Russia only controls 0.7% of the world's wealth and has much less wealth per adult than the United States ($8,843 vs $336,528). Russia has intervened militarily in other countries such as Yugoslavia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria, but not to seize natural resources like imperialist countries do.[7]

Simply put, the Russian Federation doesn't have the same mass of financial capital by which they can dominate the global south like the west does. No country intervenes millitantly without doing so for personal benefit, that would be absurd, but that also doesn't mean Russia is an empire either. The vast bulk of Russia's consumption comes from goods it produces fot itself, this is quite opposed to western countries that consume the bulk of the value the global south produces while in turn producing far less.