why is north korea imperialist in your opinion?

"employing both hard power and soft power". russia only uses military might (hard power)

i'd say modern imperialism is much more complex than grabbing land (irredentism). for example, the best example of imperialism, the US, has tied european defense to the US via nato. if their european vassals don't buy enough weapons from them or are about to buy weapons from the wrong country, they get heavily punished economically (terminating trade deals, tariffs, threats etc.)

a lot of european NATO and other vassal countries weapon systems are tied to the US so it's likely that they could just shut down my home country's air force by pressing a button, if we switched over to politics they don't like.

our (finland) voting systems, e-authentications, healthcare systems are being moved to the US cloud. this gives america leverage to basically shut our country down if we ever go against their politics. from what i've heard, microsoft's services are spreading like a cancer despite this being the homeland of linux.

i saw a news article that claimed that the biggest american companies control like 60% of the internet's traffic. the americans could initiate a disaster to any "western" country if they wished by cutting them off.

this is what modern imperalism looks like.

now take anti-imperialist countries like russia or china. they would sell all kinds of things (including weapons) to satan if he treated them fairly. they have their own internet services, they don't give a fuck. they don't push them to anyone else to make them conform to their political ideals by holding the wire cutter. this is what makes the difference.

that being said, irredentism is still awful. i'm ideologically against all forms of killing, and that includes the russian attack on ukraine. just so we're clear here, this is just about definitions, i'm not trying to argue that russia attacking its neighbors is good in any way.