I will clarify as it is either a translation error or I did not say it clearly enough: Putin is no communist or socialist, and his Tsarist sympathies are certainly not the reason for aligning with the anti-imperialist camp; he aligns with the anti-imperialist camp because of multiple failed attempts at joining the western imperialist order and it is the only way for Russia to survive against Western belligerence.

Having said that, Russia are head and shoulders above European countries, and Russia certainly has more sovereignity over their land than the Europeans have with theirs.

There are many occurences in history of capitalist countries aligning with the anti-imperialist block; eg India following independence of the formal British colonisation.

We are not supporting Russia for their capitalism (and India is an excellent example of why being anti-Western imperialism is not enough, you still need a dictatorship against capital) - we are giving critical support to Russia for their role in anti-imperialism and standing up meaningfully against Western Hegemony.

We must never equate Russia to the West here because if we do we are then (1) minimising the violence of the West with this false equivalence (2) we are minimising the ethnic cleansing of eastern Ukrainians by western proxies for which the only real material support for them was with Russian intervention (otherwise we should have to offer a concrete alternative not abstract idealism. We cannot simply say Russia should not engage in war, as dialectical materialists we have to say what realistic alternative there was in stopping the ethnic cleansing).

Hope that helped!