Russia’s economic system looks like typical industrial-ish capitalism.

Targeting internal minorities has been America’s playbook since the response to Bacon’s Rebellion and is a key tenet of every European country’s history. You’ll still find huge numbers of Europeans justifying the modern and historical persecution of Roma.

Targeting gay people has been the policy of The West for centuries. The colonizers wrote all about their disgust at “savage” people that embedded spectra of sexualities into their societies. The US only adopted a rainbow capitalist “acceptance” in the last decade.

Fascism is rooted in a particular approach to anti-left reaction. A series of methods by which to co-opt and oppose groundswells of anti-capitalist sentiment. The primary goal is to disseminate a false consciousness that redirects frustrations away from capitalism itself and instead to reactionary scapegoats, and a key part of doing so is the destruction of communists and others on the left.

Like all Western-installed capitalist regimes, whether it’s France or Russia or Japan, there are fascistic elements to the existing systems of control. Fascism was never fully defeated. The West incorporated it into their own societies. Mussolini’s and Hitler’s fascisms were the prototypes. The red scare, genocidal anticommunist campaigns, the cold war, the anti-civil rights campaigns, mass incarceration, the police state are all the modern incorporations, and every single one of them justified through nationalist, nativist, white supremacist rationales.

So yes you’ll find some fascistic elements in the Russian state.

But you won’t find that it’s run by the ham-fisted Hitlerite fascism that’s taken over large swaths of Ukrainian power structures. As a head capitalist of an existing order that has no fear of an organized left, Putin has no need to stoke outright ham-fisted fascism in his own country, as the whole point of it is to deputize a violent anti-left paramilitary. He doesn’t want one of those, he already has the army and is doing the opposite by consolidating Wagner. In addition, fascist false consciousness tends to target some of the bourgeoisie. Putin is the symbol of the system that fascists claim to oppose.

This does not make Putin a good guy. He’s as fascist as any US president. But he’s not like Sonnenrad-tatted white supremacists looking to create a neo-Bandyerite society on top of the mass graves of Russian-speakers.