Is it? I dunno, honestly. Obviously it's dehumanizing, but is it actually racist? I don't think this counts as a racial slur, it doesn't have the history, but I also don't know enough orc lore to argue. Seems more like a nerdy version of calling people barbarians...
Either way as a Russian I've waited long enough for us to get our own n-word analogue that only we get to say.
The tweet .
Weren’t the first people to call the Russian troops “orcs” Azov battalion members fighting majority Muslim divisions
Supposedly Ukrainians have been doing the orc thing at least since 2014.
I think it was definitely used that way. Azov social media was praising their soldiers slathering bullets in pig fat