Literally every one of your premises is false. It is not a “war of aggression” and while we obviously do not support Putin, for a variety of reasons, the main ones being that he is an anti-communist, a liberal and he encourages reactionary social tendencies, he is also none of the things you described him as.

It is hard to believe that this is not a troll post when in the span of a few sentences you managed to regurgitate such a high number of western imperialist propaganda talking points and repeated a half dozen of the silly names they call Putin to demonize him: “oligarch”, “richest man in the world”, “warlord”, “megalomanial” [sic], “autocrat fascist” and “tyrant”. But i’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and explain.

Let’s start from the top: firstly, there are oligarchs in Russia with close ties to the government but Putin himself is not an oligarch. You may want to look up the definition of the term if you are confused. In Russia the oligarchs are primarily those opportunistic capitalists who after the fall of the USSR managed to amass great wealth and economic-political power by gaining ownership over a significant portion of the old state industries. Putin was not among them. Putin was a bureaucrat first and then a career politician.

Secondly, there is not a single shred of evidence for the liberal media concocted myth that he is “the richest man in the world”. These allegations have never been substantiated by anything factual. They are based solely on the argument that “well, the Russian state owns X property and Putin controls the state, therefore Putin owns all of X”. It is nonsense.

Further, calling him a “warlord” is just silly, i shouldn’t even have to explain why. He does not lead a military government, he is an elected president and head of state of a civilian government. Whether or not his election was or was not legitimately democratic (by whichever measure we want to judge that) is beside the point. Like all elections in bourgeois democracies Russian elections underrepresent the working class and favor the interests of the bourgeoisie. But he is no less legitimate than any western elected official,

In fact it could be argued he has more legitimacy than most of his western counterparts as even western conducted polls that are biased against him show that his popularity is genuinely quite high. As communists we understand that this does not change the class character of his bourgeois government but it shows that many people in Russia at least in part associate the recovery that Russia has experienced since the disastrous 1990s with Putin’s governance.

As for “autocrat” that depends on whether you consider the executive powers of a president inherently autocratic. That would make the US or French presidents also autocrats. However this is an infantile accusation anyway and unbecoming of a socialist because if Putin is an autocrat then so was and is every leader of any socialist state. Liberals accuse any leader they dislike of being an “autocrat”.

So let’s simplify the discussion and look at the literal definition of “autocrat” as meaning a sole ruler with absolute power. Doing even cursory investigation of how the Russian government works we find it simply does not apply. Putin does not have unchecked autocratic power, he is checked by the Russian parliament and a number of various other governing bodies of the Russian Federation. The decision making is very much collaborative and involves a whole strata of political elites. The problem is that as in all bourgeois democracies these governing bodies and elites represent and advance the interests of the bourgeoisie first and foremost.

As for whether or not he is a fascist this opens up a whole discussion about what fascism actually is. Is social democracy just social fascism? Many leftists would also argue that the US is and has been fascist since its inception, if not towards everyone to begin with then at least toward black and indigenous people. Where even is the difference between fascism and the regular dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that we have in every capitalist country?

However if we assume for the sake of this discussion that the western liberal bourgeois democracies are not what we mean when we say fascist then neither is Russia. Russia is not in any qualitative or quantitative way more authoritarian or reactionary than the US, and in many ways it is less so. And no, fascism is not simply when people have reactionary tendencies. Otherwise most of the world would be full of fascists.

Of course we can never know what someone truly believes but at least overtly Putin himself does not seem to be ideologically fascist. He can be best described as a moderate nationalist liberal. There are people and groups in Russia with legitimately fascist ideology and the centrist Putin government sometimes flirts with them but on the whole it seems to want to keep them marginalized. Russia is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state, if a real fascist, ultra-nationalist political movement was to gain traction Russia would almost certainly devolve into internal chaos. It is not in the interests of the Russian bourgeoisie to allow that.

And as of late fascist ideology has become even more unpopular in Russia as they are at war with an actually fascist state. A state that openly worships Nazi collaborators as its national heroes, which has adopted fascist slogans and a racist, genocidal, fascist ideology, and whose soldiers are covered in Nazi insignia. A large number of Russian neonazis have gone over to the side of Ukraine and are now fighting against Russia.

Finally, calling Putin a “tyrant” is just a repeat of the accusation of being an autocrat which is simply not factual. All of these cliche expressions you have used that are lifted straight out of western media’s anti-Russian propaganda are essentially rehashings of the old racist “oriental despotism” trope. As communists must understand our class enemies and to understand what they are and what they are not. And Putin is many things we dislike and oppose but he is not the caricature that the West paints him as.

Enough about Putin, on to the war itself. The claim that it was started solely by Putin for “megalomanial” reasons is simply infantile. Not only is it embarrassing and unserious to engage in this sort of individualizing, psycho-pathologizing of complex geopolitical conflicts, it is evidence of either intent of deception or catastrophic ignorance. Conflicts between nations do not start because one person felt like starting a war. They are the result of complex processes and contradictions, often having built up for a long time.

This conflict did not start in 2022, it started at least as far back as 2014. I won’t repeat the history, you can read about it elsewhere, but suffice to say there was already a conflict happening way before Russia intervened. And Russia intervened because it was left no other choice. Not only was the expansion of NATO into the now fascist state of Ukraine becoming an existential threat, but the ethnically Russian Donbass region of Ukraine, which in 2014 rebelled against the US orchestrated fascist coup d’etat, had come under serious threat of being attacked and overrun by the spring of 2022. No Russian government could have stood by and allowed this.

Putin himself in fact was among the most reticent in Russia about taking direct military action to resolve the problem. For many years forces in Russia that sympathized with the Donbass had been pushing the Russian government to do more, to intervene directly. Multiple different diplomatic approaches were tried, none of which led anywhere, not least of all because the West, as has now been admitted, never had any intentions of negotiating in good faith and did everything it could to push Russia toward war in hopes that this would result in the fall of the Putin government and the renewed subjugation of Russia to western imperialism.

For all intents and purposes this is an act of self-defense by Russia, on behalf of itself and on behalf of the Russians in the Donbass. By the precedent that NATO itself set during the Yugoslav wars Russia recognized the secession of the Donbass republics and invoked the UN article on collective self-defense, making their intervention legal by international law and defensive.

We support Russia’s anti-fascist intervention not only on moral and legal grounds but more importantly because it is a major blow against US imperialism itself, and we recognize it as a fact that US imperialist hegmony is the biggest obstacle to socialism and socialist states everywhere. A defeat for NATO in this proxy war is a victory for the global proletariat. Anti-imperialist, anti-fascist struggle IS class war. Like the first cold war, this new cold war of the US against Russia and China represents a global dimension of the class war.

I’m amazed that embarrassing shit like this gets any amount of upvotes here on lemmygrad. Anyone who opposes Russia for “suddenly invading a peaceful, sovereign Nation” and unironically calls Putin a Warlord, Oligarch, Richest Man, etc. is not a Marxist and definitely not a Comrade but a reactionary who parrots arguments from western media. I smell wrecker.

I think c/leftistinfighting would’ve been a better place for this.

I do admit that the whole Ukraine discourse gets rather tiring as somebody who should not by any means be affected by it (but is because of shitty global economy). I am generally not concerned about gringos dying due to dumb gringo shit, so all that matters to me is whether the capitalist class will become weaker from this war, which doesn’t seem to be the case to me (please correct me though).

I wish we talked more about other conflicts and struggles going on around the world rather than hyperfocusing on the one the eurolibs are so obsessed with. This war has been a huge distraction for politics worldwide, which is why any electoral party and corporation can just shore up support by putting a blue-yellow somewhere in their branding.

As a very mild example, the WGA writers, y’know the guys who write most of our USA propaganda movies, have been on strike for 40 days now and are being boycotted by the same corporate news that can’t shut up about Disney. Additionally Sinn Féin on NI just became the largest NI party, which was also boycotted in favour of Charles 3 and how hot he is. Recently Brazil’s supposed socialist president adopted the anti-Cuban trend and reinstated the “Mais Médicos” program but focusing instead on paying fat salaries to Brazilian physicians, rather than providing actual care to rural areas. Those are not huge things by any means, but are way closer to home to those who speak Anglo than yet another imperial war in Eastern Europe. Yeah killing Nazis is fun, but there’s other fun stuff out there.

Your opinion is bad and you should feel bad.

You are moralizing like a liberal. You are tone policing. And you are attempting to apply a veneer of principles (“No war but class war”) that belies your liberal history. That you “think it needed to be said” is more evidence of this. Hopefully by participating here, you will develop out of this infantile disorder.

You said you “find it odd that there are so many marxist-leninist [sic] defending a war”. You then proceed to develop a strawman based entirely on subjective characterizations, Western propagandist claims, and even add moral components like “source of evil” and “megalomanial” [sic]. Here’s what’s actually happening.

The global white supremacist capitalist hegemon continues it’s decades long process of encircling Russia and China with advanced nuclear capabilities in order to end the dynamic of MAD and make it possible for the US to use nuclear war as a viable threat again.

The hegemon’s latest move was to establish the legal superstructure required to place advanced nuclear capabilities on the border between Russia and Ukraine - the same border that was used to invade Russia twice, the most recent being by the Third Reich.

Russia decided, based on its military intelligence and strategic analysis, that if this deployment by the hegemon were to occur, it would be nearly unrecoverable without global conflagration. Were they right? We can never know. They get to decide, not us. We are not the ones being encircled, they are. We are not the ones with the intelligence briefings, they are. They made the decisions to stop the deployment and that meant engaging the proxy.

This is a somewhat historically new proxy war formation in that the hegemon did not establish a proxy to launch an attack but rather established a proxy to engage in encirclement using the international rules-based order. Russia is fighting against public perception that hasn’t yet understood this as a proxy war, despite everyone knowing it’s a proxy war. Russia is fighting the US, there’s no question about that. Russia invaded Ukraine to fight the US. Ukraine is the proxy of the US.

Anyone who has analyzed the world systems at play here understands that nuclear encirclement must be stopped and unilateral embargo must be stopped. These two things necessarily means the emergence of a multipolar world order. No one is cheering for the death of Ukrainians (unless they’re wearing Nazi symbols). No one is cheering for the destruction of civilian infrastructure. No one is cheering for millions displaced, for generational trauma, for brutality. No one is cheering for Putin to feel good about himself, or for Russians to satisfy an imagined bloodlust, or whatever delusions you hold.

We are cheering for the evidence that supports the hypothesis that the hegemon is not as powerful as we previously believed. We are cheering for the evidence that the hegemon is not succeeding. We are cheering for the potential of the emergence of the multipolar world order.

Pay attention. Cut the liberal cop out of your brain. Actually read and do analysis. Stop believing delusions even if they make you feel good.

One more addendum to my earlier comment:

The claim that Putin’s Russia has a history of invading countries around it is simply false. The example typically given to support this assertion is the brief Russo-Georgian war of 2008, however this is a bare faced lie. Even a EU commission investigation into that conflict found that it was in fact Georgia which started it (much like Ukraine did with this one) by attacking the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia which were under Russian protection. Of course they did this at the behest and with the encouragement of the US which led them to believe that the Russians would not fight back, and if they did that the US would have Georgia’s back.

The parallels of that conflict to the one with Ukraine are actually quite impressive. In both cases the conflict was preceded by the US carrying out a color revolution to install a fanatically anti-Russian proxy puppet regime into power in those countries. Then the carrot of EU and NATO membership was dangled in front of these states under the condition that they allow themselves to be used as a battering ram against Russia. The plan was to provoke Russia into a conflict by threatening its vital interests right on its border, portraying Russia’s reaction as aggression and use this to justify imposing sanctions that were supposed to devastate Russia.

Other examples that are sometimes used to portray Russia as an inherently aggressive state are callbacks to certain actions of the Soviet Union, all of which are grotesquely misrepresented and the real history of which is systematically twisted and falsified. And in any case the Russia is not the USSR, so none of that has any bearing on discussions of the behavior if Russia as it exists today unless you subscribe to the racist belief that there is just something in Russian genes that is somehow inherently aggressive.

1. An oligarch did not start this war, a group of them did. Bourgeois are a class, not kings who act alone.

2. Putin is not an oligarch, he is a labor aristocrat as all politicians are.

3. Putin is far from the richest man in the world. As far as free capital (PPP) goes, I believe it has been continuously fluctuating between Musk and Bezos. As far as value of total assets goes, this by far goes to the US bourgeoisie as they effectively own and control the entire west and command servitude from much of the developing nations, defacto owning those as well. (basically not literally)

4. Typically warlords participate in battles, no? If this is the case, then I do not believe Putin is to be classified as a warlord.

5. Putin has invaded many nations around him, yes, but not due to megalomania, this is an anarchist/radlib belief which is injected to fill the void left by lack of understanding. NATO has couped the governments of the pette bourgeois nations surrounding Russia in attempts to make them as how we see Ukraine today in an attempt to invade, defeat, and ultimately seize the assets of Russia to fulfill the necessity of profit, to counteract the falling rate of profit, and to eliminate a major global competitor thus reinforcing and magnifying their own monopoly in preparation towards going on to attack China for the same reasons. Russia was defending it’s national security by invading, as they are doing so in Ukraine. As well, they are defending AES nations such as China and Cuba from US imperialism. They are like batman; not the hero we want, but the hero we need have.

6. Yes no war but class war, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Pragmatically speaking, anyone and I mean anyone fighting imperial capital which currently holds a practical worldwide monopoly is essential to creating open spaces for revolutions to flourish. As well, we must reject trotskyism which asserts that a world revolution lead by the west seeking it’s own unimpeded interests is the way towards communism.

7. Thank you for voicing your opinion maturely and respectfully, it helps legitimate conversion on matters to be had.

I agree that there is a great deal of magical thinking and rationalization at play. This war has been a catastrophe all-around. It has led to countless civilian deaths, the revitalization/expansion of NATO and a significant depletion of the forces and materiel of the Russian Federation.

defending a war of agression

See: The Donbas from 2014-2022

started by an oligarch

Their evil oligarchs, our billionaires (they are all bourgeois). But really, Putin is less characterized by owning the means of production than by treading water among a host of competing bourgeois interests.

possibly the richest man in the world

lmfao

I get that you want to say that NATO is a source of evil on the global stage,

Is it not?

but in this particular case you are defending Putin

Where? For doing what?

a warlord

Google, what is a warlord?

who has invaded many of his neighbouring countries

Putin is just a (weird) dude. He doesn’t do any invading. The Russian Federation has seized territory from 2 neighbors in recent history, and both have their origins in response to NATO aggressions. The idea that this is all just one dude who wants more land or fighting is ridiculous.

and has stated plans to continue his campaign for megalomanial reasons.

Who cares what he says (though I don’t even know what you’re referring to)? Unless you’re living in Russia his rhetoric doesn’t really affect you and, as a liberal politician, it’s not going to match the actions or motivations of the ruling class.

No war but class war.

I agree with the sentiment but in this particular framing it’s letting The West off the hook.

In the context of Ukraine, does that mean you support the status quo in The Donbas up to 2022? That’s an ethnic cleansing led by neo-Nazis and other fascists, particularly neo-Bandyerites, and with resistance gets oversimplified as a civil war. Minsk and Minsk II, i.e. the diplomatic paths, were never followed by The West, they just turned up the violence and funded and supplied those fascists.

Invasion by Russia was the intent of The West. They got what they wanted - a harder split between Russia and EU countries. And they were continuing to push across red lines to do it until something gave. What do you think Russia should have done?

Enabling an autocrat fascist oligarch does not do anything to counter the bad stuff done by NATO

Enabling how?

and the community should take a firm stand against the use of war for the sake of satisfying the dreams of a tyrant.

Liberal Great Man theory from a non-material perspective. If leaders of capitalist countries go against the wishes of the ruling class, they get isolated and, if necessary, murdered. This war happened with the input and strategy of many sober experts in the liberal order of Russusn Federation leadership. This is a country, not a fantasy novel.

This community does take an anti-war stance, but if you don’t understand the basic history and reasons why the war is happening you won’t be able to dole out blame or understand what outcomes are on the table right now.

This is not a troll post or anything to that extent. Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this, but I think it needed to be said.

Why did it need to be said? It is okay to not share opinions about something you haven’t spent much time learning about. We all have things we don’t know very well. I understand that there is a social normalization of having and sharing opinions before attaining knowledge, and socialists are hardly exempt from this, but it makes us, our discourse, and our ability to organize better if we can try to recognize snd combat that tendency.

Enabling an autocrat fascist oligarch does not do anything to counter the bad stuff done by NATO and the community should take a firm stand against the use of war for the sake of satisfying the dreams of a tyrant.

I’m sorry, but this reeks of major main character syndrom. What some randoms post on a niche ML community on the interwebs has literally no material impact on this conflict. Whether we condemn, cheer on, ridicule or whatever either side of this conflict is entirely immaterial. A protracted, armed conflict is neither started, nor enabled, nor stopped because of shitposters anywhere. 99% of people on this board and a least 95% of people of the internet are totally divorced from this war and at the most are cheerleaders on the sidelines. This isn’t ‘enabling’, it’s inconsequential.

No war but class war

I agree and in actual praxis this should be any communist organizations maxim. lemmygrad isn’t one though.

It’s a simple 1-2-3 process.

• I hate nazis more than anything, I’ll bash Ukraine but I won’t defend Putler.
• However, should Russia fall, the United States would be even more powerful.
• I hate the US more than I hate Putin and for this reason I’m rooting for Russia even though I wish Putler died.

And Russia needs to stay alive and relevant, someone over there will eventually revive the Soviet Union.