“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.”
I believe that such actions on the part of an empire are in one way or another aimed at the prosperity of its citizens. Putin’s regime is even worse - it does not care about its citizens and therefore I cannot even call its regime an empire.
Well that’s not what ‘empire’ means.