Yes except Russians run the fucking USSR. What is your point? I don't care what you call it. For all practical purposes it was a Russian Empire.
Nope. It was not. If that was the case, then why Crimea was separated from the Russian SSR in 1954, and gifted to the Ukrainian SSR? At that time, the peninsula was overwhelmingly populated by the ethnic Russians.
At that time the Peninsula was not inhabited for the development of its infrastructure it needed to connect to the mainland of Ukraine. In addition, the part of the Ukrainian lands went to Russia.