Just to be clear comparisons to the US aren't in Russia's interest for its a comparison they shall lose.
One factor is that Russia escalated far beyond what the US did. Unlike Russia the US doesn't want to physically wipe countries out and annex their territories. In fact unlike Russia the modern US hasn't done any illegal annexations in their unjust wars.
Most of America's wars are formed on shaky ground indeed but not even the US has it as a motive for war that they just can't accept that their enemies are independent countries. No American argument argued ''This country used to be owned and terrorized by us so therefore we have the right to own and terrorize it again!''
The US isn't overly concerned with civilian casualties. Yet unlike with Russia civilian casualties are collateral damage rather than something they maliciously strive for. And while the US had it share of war crimes they don't put up torture camps in literally every village they occupy.
And the modern US doesn't have the goal of enacting ethnic cleansing in the areas they control. Russia does have the end goal of ethnic cleansing in Ukraine.
The Russian army and government are far more unjustified in their actions, far more corrupt, far more illegitimate and far more psychotic than the Americans could ever hope to be.
I recall Russia parading the Ukrainian president around as their puppet and openly had him betray Ukraine for Russia. I also recall them poisoning one of the Ukrainian presidents before the puppet just because they considered him annoying. Before 2014 Russia was just as much the aggressor as before 2014. Every single escalation in this conflict came from the Kremlin.
Indeed. I remember one interview early on in the invasion where a former U.S. military official pointed out that if that were the U.S. the war would have ended on Day One because the U.S. would bomb Ukraine back to the Stone Age. Reminds me of what it did in Iraq and Vietnam.
The U.S. does not want to annex territories because it needs other countries to keep using the dollar. That's why it uses its war machine to set up hundreds of military installations in the world to protect the "freedoms" of the human race, and then uses the IMF-WB to set up financial loans and aid with strings attached via structural adjustment policies.
This explains why it has the largest military budget of all countries and has been manipulating and engaging in "police action" in many countries for decades:
leading to deaths that make Russia and China look like rank amateurs:
The Costs of War Project is a team of 35 scholars, legal experts, human rights practitioners, and physicians, which began its work in 2011. We use research and a public website to facilitate debate about the costs of the post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
watson.brown.edu
The difference is between it and its military rivals is that it considers itself a liberal democracy and a "beacon" of freedom worldwide, while all rivals are "tyrannies."
The two tools to accomplish these are Wall Street, which manages the assets of the 10 pct of Americans which own 70 pct of the total wealth of the country, and the military industrial complex, which it arms and involves collusion between the the government, its military, and industries to sell armaments to various groups worldwide (the U.S. is the no. 1 arms dealer in the world) and to profit from such.
That's why the U.S. has been at war for much of its existence:
The American history of overt and covert foreign interventions dates back to 1811, when it had invaded Chile, just a year after this South American country had gained independence from...
www.thenews.com.pk
as it thrives on conflict, and after WW2, profits heavily from it as well.
Meanwhile, conflict also keeps rivals like Russia and China weak and most countries dependent on the dollar for trade, which is what the U.S. needs to continue decades of voodoo economics needed to binge on borrowing and spending, much of which is needed to finance the same military industrial complex, with costs passed on to the unwitting public drenched in consumer spending:
Investors are celebrating an incipient “recovery,” but the interventions that were responsible for it are sowing the seeds of a more violent contraction...
seekingalpha.com
and mass entertainment and propaganda sold to them by the same rich:
www.businessinsider.com
The same thing happens elsewhere, with food processing, pharma, energy, the defense industry, and banking controlled by few corporations, and the 90 pct of the U.S. population beholden to the richest for credit.
Part of that propaganda involves depicting other countries as barbaric, evil, tyrannical, and so on. Meanwhile, the country plays both sides, e.g., arming Israel but also Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan, refusing to recognize Taiwanese sovereignty to appease China, which is a major trading partner, and then arming Taiwan to keep China off-balance, etc.