"You appear to be concerned about evil empires - do you claim that Russia isn't one?" I think it is you who claims that IT IS. One cannot simply SAY IT. What evidence brought you to an idea that an unknown far away country is an "evil empire"? I think to have such a belief, one must completely trust whatever CIA and the US government SAY about Russia, so that you don't even feel that it is racist and supremacist to believe crap about a whole foreign country. Most Americans that I know who believe that "Russia is an evil empire", are hopelessly supremacist, hell-bent on supporting American global dominance and ownership of the whole world. Anything you can incriminate Russia, the United States have done in a thousandfold. Except, nuclear bombing of Japan and nuclear weapon testing on live human beings of Marshall Islands is something that only the US have done. A specialty. so to speak. Also, Russia was not created by extermination of some indigenous population and is not a State with a settler-colonial past.

BTW "I'm now very sceptical of your claim that you're entirely reader-financed" - and who cares about you being "sceptical" (sic)? Unfortunately, such Americans and the US' politics fall under the definition of a mentally disturbed individual, as they say in Germany "Der kann sich nicht relativieren".