.
Russia intervened in a very limited intervention in the former Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s when the Russian forces acted as soft cops for NATO. Russia fought over pro-Russian South Ossetia with Georgia in 2008, which was backed by the U.S.
The conflict in Ukraine is a direct result of the US engineering a rightwing anti-Russian coup in 2014. The people in the eastern region of the Ukraine, which is predominantly Russian-speaking, rose up demanding political and economic autonomy. While those in east Ukraine are backed by Russia, Moscow has shown no interest in absorbing the eastern Ukraine as it did with the Crimea after the referendum there.
Russia's direct military involvement in 2015 in the Syrian war is similar to that in the Ukraine: to fend off continuing US-NATO regime change and encirclement of their country. Russia was invited in by the Syrian government to assist in defeating rebel groups armed and financed by the US, NATO countries and Saudi Arabia.
Unlike the US, Britain and France, in none of these cases has Russia intervened militarily to overthrow a government in order to protect its foreign economic interests.
5. Russia and Imperialism Today
Referencing Lenin's statement on imperialism, Russia is not a player in the dominance of monopolies and finance capital, nor does the export of capital play an important role (save the negative effect of on-going capital flight), nor do Russian trusts play any essential role in the division of the world resources.
Russia can be ranked as one of the world's most powerful states only based on its military strength. Economically it shares the characteristics not of an advanced capitalist state, but of one on the capitalist semi-periphery. It plays very little part in the quintessential imperialist activity: the export of capital to the periphery and the extraction of profit from developing countries' labor and resources. Russia's finance capital is small, its exports predominantly raw materials, its industry weak, its multinational corporations minor, its economy plagued by low labor productivity.
Imperialism continues to be the main danger to the life and well-being of the peoples of the world. Our problems, humanity's problems are rooted in imperialist domination of our nations and our lives. Specifically, this means the rule of the US imperialist boss and the secondary imperial powers in its orbit: Western Europe, Japan, Canada and Australia. Russia, while a capitalist country, bullied by the US because of its independence (like Venezuela, Iran, Qaddafi's Libya, Nicaragua) is not part of any imperialist cabal that threatens us. Rather the world powers of Russia and China find they must respond to imperialism's efforts to subordinate them. Fortunately, their inconsistent resistance does provide openings for other peoples and countries to assert their own national sovereignty.
[1] Stephen Cohen wrote in The Failed Crusade that after the collapse of the Soviet Union began the most cataclysmic peacetime economic collapse of an industrial country in history. Capitalist restoration brought mass pauperization and unemployment, wild extremes of inequality, rampant crime, virulent anti-Semitism and ethnic violence, combined with legalized gangsterism and precipitous looting of public assets. By 1998 investment was down by 80%, real wages by half and meat and dairy herds by 75%. Those living below the poverty line in the former Soviet republics had risen from 14 million in 1989 to 147 million. This had produced more orphans than Russia's 20 million-plus wartime casualties, epidemics of cholera and typhus re-emerged, millions of children suffered from malnutrition and adult life expectancy has plunged.
Fidel Castro spoke of the scandalous looting of post-Soviet Russia in the latter part of a 1998 speech: http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1998/ing/f280998i.html
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