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.