I recommend you some light reading, the excellent Michael Robert's(one of the leading modern Marxist economists) blog and this post on Chinese imperialism and by proxy also Russian imperialism

Now it is about China, but all the arguments apply to Russia since obviously Russia is extremely far behind Chinese economic development at this point. But even if this doesn't convince you it is at least important to understand, as he explains the actual economic definition of Imperialism. Every other definition from anyone that isn't a Marxist is just libshit, equivalent to "tankie". It is a meaningless term because they don't understand Lenin's definition and worse still don't even understand the modern context.

Also I don't know why but I'm convinced mainstream media uses the term as a proxy for "Empire building" which is why Russia(Putin just wanted the former Russian empire got it? lol lmao) was suddenly criticized for being imperialist even though their economy is not dependent on obvious imperialist characteristics i.e transfer of value from the global south. On the contrary, Russia is one of the biggest exporters of precious and valuable raw materials to the imperialist western powers.

Then there was the debate about the nature and causes of modern imperialism. Readers of this blog will know that Guglielmo Carchedi and I have published a paper on the economics of modern imperialism, in which we argue with empirical evidence that the economic core of modern imperialism is the unequal exchange of value (surplus value) through international trade (and capital flows) between the advanced capitalist economies and the rest of the world. It is the persistent and pervasive transfer of value to the advanced economies from the rest that best characterizes the former as imperialist.

Exploitation of the global south by the imperialist bloc is not mainly the result of ‘super-exploitation’ of the workers of the south or through the monopoly of markets and finance in the north; but through the redistribution of surplus value from the technologically backward economies to the technologically advanced, both through unequal exchange in trade and through the repatriation of profits, interest and rent by multi-nationals and banks.

Now our thesis was challenged by Charlie Post who also rejected the super exploitation and Leninist monopoly finance theories. He argued that using aggregate or average measures of the technological superiority of imperialist economies over those in the Global South failed to pick up sectors where the latter had already gained superiority. In particular, Charlie was arguing that China has become a leader in many sectors and so could not be considered just another exploited economy, but increasingly should be considered a future entrant into the imperialist bloc.

And yet in our paper, Carchedi and I had shown a large net transfer of surplus value from China to the imperialist bloc which we defined as the G7 plus a few other economies in the Global North. All have persistent and significant net value transfers from the rest of the world. On this definition, China (or for that matter, Russia) was not an imperialist state or economy. Moreover, no country since Japan and the US in the late 19th century has joined the imperialist club since 1915 when Lenin identified these imperialist nations – unless you consider tiny Taiwan or South Korea as entrants.

There is more and I definitely recommend you read the entire post and definitely the rest of the blog, you can use the search there if you're interested in certain topics.