NATO has murdered millions of civilians since their inception as an anti-communist bloc, and Russia even under Putin has been there at every turn to prevent that (Syria, South America, Iran just in recent years). The US admitted shortly after the beginning of the war that Ukraine was never going to be in NATO, and Merkel admitted late last year that Minsk I and II were only made to gain time and prepare Ukraine against Russia (i.e. giving them equipment and weapons so they can keep the grinder going to the last Ukrainian).

If the “international rules-based order” thinks they can ignore those rules and interfere in foreign affairs as if they’re the world police, what do you think is going to happen at some point? Strong words clearly brought Russia nowhere, who participated in the peace talks of Minsk I and II and who received an agreement that NATO would not expand east of their 1991 member countries.

supporting an invasion on an neighbouring country by a fascist regime as a communist

Yes yes everything you don’t like is fascism 😴

I’m not sure that MLs support the invasion. That seems like a bit of a mischaracterisation even if it is one way of reading what is being said.

I’ll make two clarifications.

First, MLs are not in favour of war or violence except in self-defence. If MLs ever seem to be in support of a war, it must be because they see it as in self-defence. But they would always, unequivocally prefer a peaceful solution.

This war in Ukraine is tragic in the extreme. I wish it could be ended today but that’s just a fantasy. Ukraine has attempted to negotiate with Russia several times since the invasion. Every time, a ‘Western leader’, be it Biden, Blinken, Boris Johnson, or another ghoul has sent more weapons and insisted that Ukraine make no compromises. This is not a route to peace. The ‘West’ is not motivated to seek peace, as it’s historic pattern of behaviour demonstrates.

So it’s not necessarily ‘support for Russia’, so much as criticism of those who impede the peace process and cheerlead for war. This only looks like support for Russia’s invasion to people who (1) don’t understand imperialism, (2) don’t accept the truth about the motivations of the US and it’s allies, and (3) insist that (i) the US is a righteous state, and (ii) as such, criticising the US must mean ‘supporting’ the ‘bad guys’.

It’s a false equivalence. There’s a certain irony in the criticism of MLs that relies on this logic at the same time as insisting that the US is not involved and that this is a war solely between Russia and Ukraine. If the US is not involved as one of the main drivers of this war, the ML critique does not apply to Ukraine and, more importantly, the idea that MLs support Russia would not appear to follow logically from the ML critique of the US.

The MLs would simply be wrong because they’re making (falsifiable) political economic analysis, not moral claims. The political economic truth of the matter is crucial to MLs as it is this truth that guides ML practice. There is no incentive to make faulty arguments for MLs who want to win (by making revolution).

Others have addressed the fact that Russia tried repeatedly and in apparent good faith to avoid war in Ukraine for years – and succeeded, too, for a long time. We now know for a fact that the other side was not acting in good faith in those negotiations, during which time neo-Nazi militia troops killed thousands of ethnic Russian Ukrainians.

Still, MLs aren’t necessarily ‘supporting the invasion’ inasmuch as they have analysed the situation and decided it’s naive to think that Russia just decided to invade Ukraine for whatever motivations are ascribed to Russia/Putin.

Second, related to this point, it’s not anti-American imperialism. It’s anti-imperialism. The US just happens to be imperialist and the core of the imperial core.

Imperialism has several meanings. It can mean ‘relating to empire’. But that’s not generally how MLs use the term.

Following Lenin, imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism, in which finance capital is used to create monopolies and crush all competition.

There are serious contradictions within the practice of imperialism. Understanding these contradictions allow one to predict the form and content of all three World Wars (including the European colonial period of conquest), the ‘end’ of colonialism (really, a shift towards socialism, as in China, or neo-colonialism, as in most of Africa), and the imperialist approach to the cold war, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, etc. That is: imperialism requires (1) infinite growth, which means always looking for new markets, resources, labour pools, and (2) crushing those who refuse to be part of the monopoly.

As the lead player in imperialism, the US’s actions, and any conflicts in which it is involved, can only be understood in light of imperialism. This is a basic fact of current geopolitics. As such, even if the US says one thing, it’s actions can only be understood by analysing those actions in light of the fact of imperialism.

(Maybe US motivations in Ukraine are benevolent. It’s impossible to know for as long as the US is materially vested by trapping Ukraine into debt and selling it weapons.)

Russia is not an imperialist state in the same sense, even if it’s ruling class would love to set that up and even if an invasion could be understood as empire-building as in times of old. I doubt it, though, as isolationism cannot work and international law does not recognise changes of land borders through war (we’ll ignore the fact that the US has supported Israel’s doing just that because that’s an anomaly, with which much of the rest of the world disagrees).

Russia does not have a monopoly of finance capital, in part, because the US has that monopoly (although it’s currently losing that monopoly as the world becomes multipolar). Russia’s actions in Ukraine are unlikely to be imperialist under Lenin’s model. You may want to look into Michael Hudson’s work on imperialism to better understand this process (his book is Super Imperialism, in it’s third edition).

In conclusion, any apparent ‘support for Russia’ is in fact a valid criticism of imperialism based on the available evidence. I.e. it is not ‘support for Putin’ simpliciter. Accepting this means accepting the ML critique of imperialism. From this perspective, the US hand in perpetuating this war is visible. Whatever Russia has done wrong (and as a capitalist state, it’s not exactly benevolent), we cannot progress without also acknowledging that, to put it colloquially, it takes two to tango.

Edit: the equation of Russia with fascism is a strange one that will require a nuanced analysis of fascism. Perhaps that question would be better separated into it’s own thread.

so, we don’t really view Ukraine’s government as good for the people you know? To us, does it really matter if it’s western, Ukrainian, or Russian oligarchs controlling the workers’ of Ukraine resources? The absolute best scenario, for us, would be worker revolutions taking over Ukraine and Russia during this war, but that is literal fantasy. So, we have to play geopolitics here.

China is our biggest hope for dethroning the US as the hegemon. In fact, barring something absolutely terrible like Russia becoming an actual US puppet regime or nuclear holocaust, it seems inevitable that China will accomplish this. So, for us, Russia losing the war and either starting ww3 with nukes or losing and turning into another place that will allow another gazillion US military bases is the absolute worst result.

It’s fucking horrible, the loss of lives in this war. But since it’s happening, we have to pick a side. And picking Ukraine is picking the side of US imperialism.

I’m not the best at explaining all this stuff, but I swear we aren’t bloodthirsty Putin fans, those are lies told about us.

To attempt to explain this without using the ‘critical support’ formulation, it’s not necessarily ‘support’ of Russia in as much as it is supporting the prospect of your own state (whichever that may be) failing to advance its war goals so that instability (and thus a potential path to a revolution) is created. I personally don’t look at Russia as some kind of darling, but if the West proxy-war stomp them that isn’t any good for the prospect of conditions changing in any way that supports raising of class consciousness, worker organisation, and eventually revolution. (Not to mention the threat of a frankly very much more erratic Russian Federation potentially using nuclear weapons, which is a complete failure state for humanity)

Russian communists should be anti-Russia, western communists should be anti-West. (ex: Russia loses, is destabilised, creates better conditions for revolution there. If Russia keeps this going for a long time, the West keeps bankrupting itself, causing internal strife, creating better conditions there) If that makes any sense.

With regard to sympathy for Ukraine, it is kinda like… the US is absolutely going to drop Ukraine like a toy they’ve gotten bored of the moment that war goals are achieved (and this is already happening with Europe pivoting away from Russian gas and toward US LNG exports). In a scenario where Russia is defeated, you can already see US capital rubbing their hands together in glee for all the exploitation they can do “rebuilding” Ukraine in their own image.

I personally think a lot of people get a bit lost in the sauce trying to pick one side or another to “support” when the answer is to be against your “own” side, which sometimes looks like “supporting” the other side.

Stop projecting, yankee. YOUR country is doing imperialism, has always been doing imperialism and will continue doing imperialism until it dies. There can only ever be max. one imperialist overlord in a connected world, and it currently is the usa.

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