For example, I see very little difference in terms of character; the variations between essentially boil down to respective levels of access to effective weaponry, geographical access to their enemies, and specific “enemy” groups.

However, there's a spectrum. And Putin is definitely farther along towards authoritarian than any present day liberal democracy.

The rest of those qualifications certainly exist in Russia but I don't think it's to the extent where it's a characteristic of the regime.

Fascism seems to be a "I know it when I see it" thing and I just don't see Putin as any more than a strong man ala Saddam Hussein. Somehow I feel like somewhat of a cult of personality is a key aspect of fascism and an much more oppressive suppression of subversive ideas, more like North Korea. In Russia, we hear about Pussy Riot rather than them dissapearing before we do.

Like, this just reads like a "far left" person wrote a long list of negative slander to throw at their opponents. I don't think anyone on the right would agree with essentially any of it.

The "ultra-nationalist" I guess maybe sort of works, if hyperbolic, in that I think you would get right-wing people to agree that they would prioritize their nation over others, but I think if you asked a random right-wing person on the street "do you support ____" for anything else on your list, they'd say no.

I'm solidly on the left by contemporary American standards, but I just wish we'd actually have honest discussions about what people believe and want, rather than slinging insults that our opponents are evil, vile people who intentionally want bad things because they're bad.

Everyone knows what "genocide" means. It means an attempt to murder an entire group of people. That's why the word ends in "-cide," like "homicide," "suicide," "regicide," "fratricide" and other words that have to do with killing. When you say that Russia is committing genocide, everyone thinks you're saying that Russia is attempting to kill every single person in Ukraine. That's what the word means in the English language, as understood by the gobal community of native speakers.

The people using the word "genocide" are doing so precisely because the word has such a strong connotation. They want people to make the connection to the Holocaust, Rwanda, and other cases of mass murder of an entire people. However, that comparison is obviously absurd, because Russia isn't trying to wipe out the Ukrainian population.

So when pressed, defenders of the use of the term "genocide" retreat to a much narrower argument. They argue that according to a particular reading of the Genocide Convention, Russian actions fall into some technical definition of "genocide" - a definition that has absolutely nothing to do with how normal people understand the term. Now, that reading of the Genocide Convention is an enormous stretch, but people who want to use the word "genocide" fall back to it.

But of course, nobody is interested in a highly tendentious, dubious reading of the Genocide Convention. People are interested in whether Russia is committing "genocide" as the word is actually understood by real people.

I'll also add that even going by the Genocide Convention, the claim that Russia is committing genocide is still absurd. I don't want to get into it in detail, because it's a technical argument that's unrelated to what people actually care about. However, I'll just point out that the Ukrainian government is claiming that literally every Ukrainian child in Russia is abducted. Anyone who knows anything about Ukraine and Russia knows how absurd that claim is. There are very tight familial connections between Russians and Ukrainians (they were part of the same country for most of the last 400 years, after all). Because of that, Russia is the #1 destination for Ukrainian refugees. A lot of people escaping the violence have gone to live with family in Russia. Using that to accuse Russia of genocide is a really bold rhetorical gambit.