“The emperor only values his throne and will do anything to protect it, while all others are mere resources to be exploited,” writes Aleksandar Đokić, a Serbian political scientist and former lecturer at RUDN University in Moscow. “In other words, the Russian empire is knowingly throwing its own people, people of its own nation, into a meatgrinder, a virtual abyss.”
Don’t see too many “modern world” countries, as you put it, attacking neighbors in a land grab. Russia has done so several times over the last decade in a very colonial way. Calling it an Empire might be glib, but isn’t incorrect based on their expansion