the targeting of internal minorities, particularly homosexuals, seems congruent; the regime’s media mouthpieces say things about nearby countries that sound fascist.

Liberal nationalism does a fine job doing all that on its own, can't just apologize for all the things that all variants of liberalism do by saying "all the bad stuff was actually fascist, not liberal"

Manifest Destiny and the extermination of native Americans was a liberal project, at minimum as bad as lebensraum? Yes.

Fascism is the immunological response of capital that manifests at the dawn of a socialist revolution, the death throes of capitalism where capitalists employ an unending wave of terror to destroy and murder socialist networks, and so thoroughly traumatize the population that it can never have the social cohesion again necessary for socialist organizing or construction.

This was first done in the murder of the Communist Party of Germany by the Freikorps as ordered by the liberal wing of Weimar, and the rise of the Nazi party in its place.

Kissinger outlined and formalized this policy, widely recognized by social democratic and social democratic leaning liberals as "shock therapy". Repeated and iterated upon as standard U.S policy from Korea, to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, etc.

Putin came out of the Russian national bourgeoisie's resistance to shock therapy. Naturally, right-wing, anti-communist, and extremely reactionary, but from a project based around protectionism of Russian bourgeoise interests rather than breaking open the Russian market for Western capital (which would loot the oligarchs).