Bonus fact: The Soviet Union successfully argued at the United Nations that it only counts as colonialism when there is an ocean between the colonizer and their victims. Otherwise it's just sparkling nation building.

The United States agreed, for similar reasons to the Soviets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_water_thesis

I don't really see the point of reading a wall-of-text if the headline spells out the obvious well enough - but yes, Lenin probably would classify Putin's Russia as imperialist.

I, meanwhile, would happily classify Lenin as an imperialist - and I'd do the same for the Soviet Union he helped to create.

Ain't reading all that but yes, any marxist who had read Bukharin, Lenin and other marxists who had done analysis on imperialism knows that. Unfortunately, marxism has been suffering from its fair share of modernizers and falsifiers, most notably stalinists (ML's) and it's ideological offshoots (maoists, national socialists, communizers, eurocommunists, etc) who more often than not take up campist stances and distort material reality or texts and end up supporting """anti-imperialist imperialism""" because it goes against the west. There's no use bringing up Lenin since they operate within an entirely different worldview.

Anarchism has pretty much the exact same problem though, there's a lot of 'anarchists' here who go through the exact same mental hoops to support Ukraine for exactly the same reasons for instance.