I'm not sure how to write this without it sounding like ragebait or a fed post.
But why do most fellow Marxists critically support Russia today?
I can understand having seen Russia as a potential temporary ally or a necessary power that can stand against US / NATO hegemony over the globe. In short I can understand it from a strategic standpoint.
But what about morals of this?
To explain I've seen seen Russia as a necessary potential ally in the past too. But that has changed with the Ukraine war and concurrent events in Russia.
The way I see it, even with a CIA coup, a full scale invasion of a country still isn't justified. It's bordering on insanity in my mind to start such a war. The way the war and conscription is handled in Russia is also highly critiquable. The way people who fall from grace, also "fall out of windows" too.
The other major event that made me doubt Putin more was part of the leaks that happened with Navalny's death. Specifically the revelation of how Putin spend hundreds of millions not just on a palace like so many corrupt leaders and dictators do, but essentially what amounts to an own private town.
This is what lead me to believe that Putin devolved into insanity and paranoia from what he used to be, a calculated sensible dictator.
With all this in mind, why should we offer critical support to Russia instead of Ukraine?
Yes you can argue that Ukraine has been taken over via a pro-western coup regime, but they're still not the aggressors in the war.
I find it morally questionable to support an aggressor in such a clear scenario. And purely strategically speaking with how Russia is bogged down in Ukraine, I find their military capabilities not great either for any conflict with NATO.
Do any of you have any moral reasoning to critically support Russia? Or do you support it out of strategic reasons despite moral objections?
Full scale invasion is a phrase that you keep using, and it makes you sound like you're getting all your information from redditors, because it just means invasion but sounds worse, like regime vs government.
First of all, that's not true. Russia wasn't overthrown a decade ago by neo-nazis and they weren't creating neo-nazi brigades within their military and using them to harass minority language speakers while also banning them from public life.
Secondly being NATO aligned is an incredibly big deal. For one, it puts you within the political bloc that's committing a modern Holocaust, amongst a bunch of other horrific crimes.
And trying to destroy a Nazi government is much different than the CIA couping a country to install a Nazi government what are you talking about?
You sound like a liberal. I've pretty much only ever seen good posts from lemmygrad so this is shocking to me.
Now this is just an irrational and insulting response, calling me a lib.
All you're doing is throwing the word nazi around.
Neither Russia nor Ukraine is run by nazis.
But both have nazis and other fascists running rampant in their society and army. Wagner quite famously had many far right elements. The only difference between Wagner and Azov was that Wagner was a mercenary troop and not directly part of the Russian army.
What you're describing essentially draws no difference between the two countries, except that one has been aligned by NATO. So again I have to ask, why support Russia in this case? And as it seems from your comment, why so uncritically on top of it?
Russia is not struggling against western imperialism, it's trying to cling onto it's past sphere through it's own imperialism which just so happens to put them up against the expansion of the US hegemony.
As I said before I can understand the strategic interest in Russia winning. But again morally I do not see how this justifies it. Neither government is worse than the other, both filled with corruption, far right elements, oligarchs, oppression and massacres. But only one is defending.
I'm not defending Ukraine. I'm saying they have a right to defend themselves against aggression. As any nation does with the rare exception of countries that commit massive atrocities and genocides (Cambodia, Nazi Germany (ofc tho they were in fact the aggressor), Rwanda, Myanmar).
Furthermore if not a full scale invasion, then what was the push for Kiev when the war started? Its goal was the quick overthrow and surrender of the Ukrainian government and armed forces. After that failing Russia is still occupying probably around 1/4 to 1/3 of Ukrainian lands since the war started. Troop movements and the front lines are objective facts.
Ukraine is run by Nazis. Sorry but you are out of your depth in this conversation. You won't understand why we critically support Russia until you get your basic facts straight and stop listening to the western propaganda around this issue. Even the verbiage you are using is straight out of their propaganda playbook. You are repeating unserious cliche phrases while entirely ignoring the actual reality and history of this conflict.
Listen to the voices of people from the Donetsk and Lugansk regions who actually lived through the Nazi terror bombing. And they were the lucky ones because they are now in liberated territories. Countless Russian speaking Ukrainians continue to be terrorized and abused by Nazi thugs every day, be forced into trenches with a gun at their back, and have their friends and relatives abducted, tortured and murdered in the torture dungeons of the Kiev regime.
I don't even want to get into the whole NATO expansion argument because to me that is secondary. Russia's intervention was not only strategically correct from an anti-imperialist perspective, it was a moral imperative! And i'm tired of mincing words on this issue so i'll say it straight up: The Kiev regime is a terrorist Nazi entity with zero legitimacy that is held up only by Western money and weapons, and through brutal violence, terror and repression. Ukraine as a sovereign state does not exist anymore.
This didn't start in 2022, it started in 2014 when the US and EU orchestrated a coup and installed a puppet regime that launched a war against its own people. They are the aggressors. Russia isn't invading anything, it is liberating a brotherly nation that has been taken over by a Nazi cult and turned into a pawn of imperialist aggression against Russia. Russia is doing in Ukraine what the whole world should be doing in occupied Palestine: stopping a genocide and eliminating a rabid, fascist, out-of-control US proxy regime.
@[email protected]
You can hear those voices in this documentary: 8 Years Before
I strongly disagree with almost everything in your post, but I don't want to get into a huge line by line discussion about everything, so I'm just going to address the emotionally loaded propaganda phrasing that you keep using.
An invasion. You can just say invasion. You know that that accurately describes what happened, but "full scale" makes it sound more sinister while providing zero information.
What does full scale even mean? Total war like in WW2? Troops in every part of the invaded country? All of the invading country's armed forces entering the invaded country?
It clearly can't be any of those because none of those are true. It doesn't mean anything. Russia invaded Ukraine is a fact. "Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine" is a propaganda line from a Washington Post article.
Real war fans know that Russia's invasion was actually O scale.
If Putin had recruited an army of Smurfs he could have done the funniest thing ever and made a Z-scale invasion
Damn. It was right there!
This tells me you're not here in good faith.
Read the opening phrase of this comment chain again.
nazi is the right word; the ukrainian brigades fomenting the violence pride themselves in following in the footsteps of the 3rd reich and have even adopted their imagery.
it seems like you're intentionally ignoring this very important point.