I think this is an abuse of terminology. Colonial empires generally maintained a clear separation between the colonizers and the colonized. Russia usually tried to turn the conquered peoples into Russians. It's a different kind of oppression, and one which almost every nation state is guilty of.

This is a long discussion, if you want to have it I have LOTS of thoughts about it.

But short answer is - Russians absolutely have separation between colonizers and colonized. To this day.

In modern Russia the usual word to describe immigrants and non-ethnic Russians is "chorni" which basically means "blacks" and is used as a slur. There's discrimination, there's police raids on people hiring them in European part of Russia. They are overwhelmingly sent to die in Ukraine instead of "proper" Russians from the European part of the country.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/russias-ethnic-minorities-...

> The BBC found that six of the 10 Russian regions with the highest mortality rates in Ukraine are located in Siberia and the far east. And that men from Buryatia, a Russian republic whose residents are descended from Mongols, are 75 times more likely to die than men from Moscow.

Even Ukrainians before the current war weren't treated as "proper" Russians - they were "smallrussians" - the country bumpkin stupid childish version of a "proper" Russian that have to be ruled by the Mother Rossiya or they will have a failed state forever. Basically the Russian version of "the burden of the white man".

Also let's not forget Stalin took food from the most fertile part of USSR - Ukraine - and distributed it to the rest of USSR/exported it, leaving millions of Ukrainians to die of starvation in Hlodomor. And then sent "proper" ethnic Russian colonists to replace the dead Ukrainians.

Russia did the same with Crimean Tartars, just using mass murder and expulsion instead of famine.

There were also other ethnic cleansing done by NKVD. They took adress/phone books, looked at the surnames, and arrested/murdered people based on the surname endings.

Russia absolutely was and still is a colonial empire.

No, it's just a different flavor of colonization.

Plenty of other empires have attempted to assimilate the colonized population to some degree. It's not even an unusual aspect of colonization; historically it's been a ubiquitious aspect, in fact.