I agree. Would be curious to hear you dwell on this
The reason I think this is because there's like a theoretical "ideal" for every state that the government is not always in control of and has to follow, and its wars have to be premised on this ideal. Everyone is subconsciously aware of the limits of what their government should be doing abroad. I think this along with the official rhetoric is the standard we should judge whether a war is Imperialist. I'm not saying we should just uncritically accept state propaganda, but what governments say publicly is usually a kind of internal consensus that they are very unlikely to overstep.
For instance the British invasion of Bengal in 1799 or whenever wasn't premised on imperial expansion at the time and I don't think it can be described as imperialist by that point. It wasn't until the 1830s or thereabouts when the pragmatism of trade protectionism evolved into a fully-fledged ideology of conquest, dividing the entire world into Civilized and Barbarian, where there is no limit to the use of force against other states. While there is a tiny bit of that in some Russian media, it's inconceivable that they could make the jump to imperialism at this stage.
Stated goals do not matter as they can shift within a blink of an eye and everyone will pretend the previous version was just mind games to con the west.
But actually, preventing NATO expansion was never a stated goal of this war. First it was "denazification and demilitarization" of Ukraine. Then it was "helping the people of Donbas". Then it was ****ing whatever, including preventing Russian moms and dads from turning into parent #1 and parent #2. I don't think the limits you're talking about are a reality in Russian internal discourse.
I still think all of those goals fall within a broad existing framework of "pushing away western influence". As schizophrenic as they seem, Putin or the Russian press couldn't get away with explicitly declaring that the war was about expanding the Russian state. Compare this to the USSR whose geopolitical ideology was based purely on toppling capitalist or feudal governments and expanding the Soviet system. It makes little material difference as a civilian on the ground of course, but it drastically changes how states behave to one another.
Even the US, at the height of its unipolar hegemony in the 1990s, had to use cringey liberal language and the goal of spreading liberal democracy to justify its wars. This seems to be less about public opinion and more about different elements in the deep state (or in Putin's case, just the state) trying to convince each other to go to war, because even for a massively unpopular war like Iraq where the propaganda failed to convince citizens in Europe and the UK, they didn't give a crap and went in anyway.
Yes, it was built with the intention of clashing with NATO and countering their military doctrine. But wouldn't you say this looks suspiciously more like an invading army rather than a defending one? If not, please explain why.
Well yeah, but any "defensive" army can be used to invade. I don't think they altered their doctrine just for this war, as evidenced by how much of a disaster it's been.