The Empire has done a lot of bad things, as has the US (wiping out the Indians, for example) but, unlike Russia, the West has actually learned from some of its mistakes. Issues such as land grabs or annexations are unthinkable in the West, can you honestly imagine a scenario in which Germany occupies Alsace-Lorraine and annexes that region? The past is the past, we learned from it and even if we still make mistakes, there have been major, undeniable improvements.
Can you say that for today's Russia, which takes over foreign territories and in which members of the opposition routinely get killed, sent to prison or into exile?
The whataboutism you keep repeating like a broken record has no bearing on the subject at hand. What the West did wrong in the past or it does wrong now has no bearing on the dangerous social and political regression that's happening in Russia.
The mistakes made in Iraq, in example, were subject to a free, democractic vote. no one forced the members of the Parliament to vote in the manner in which they did, where as in Russia different views often imply lower life expectancy. There's no moral equivalence between the mistakes of the West and the abhorrent current behaviour of Russia, particularly when you consider thier latest aggression is against the closest thing they have to a sibling, among other nations.
