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How are they a bad guy? They are defending themselves against imperialist encroachment and fighting against a murderous Nazi regime.
For the first time since the end of the USSR a non-Western power is openly confronting the collective West and winning, both militarily and economically. They have shown the entire world what a paper tiger NATO is, which in turn emboldens others to stand up to the imperialists instead of cowering in fear.
They are liberating an oppressed people from fascism while at the same time depleting NATO arsenals that would otherwise be used to murder people all across the global south, costing the West billions and trapping them in a losing quagmire from which they cannot escape. And last but not least they are keeping the US distracted and buying China time to be even better prepared for any future confrontation in the Pacific.
All of these things are objectively good from an anti-imperialist perspective.
Russia is not fighting a war of liberation, it is a war for regional strategic purposes. If it were about liberating the ethnic Russians oppressed by Ukraine they would not be so happy with a slow churning meat grinder approach, they would do what the west does and destroy country-wide infrastructural. The war is about taking out Ukraine as a threat, a forward base for NATO interests. That they will increasingly provide security for the people of Donbas is good.
We critically support Russia against UA because they’re US/NATO pawns that were doing preliminary ethnic cleansing and being used to poke Russia, and because we usually live in Russophobic countries where absurd lies about the war prevail, but Russia is still a capitalist country that uses its military for its own interests, not anti-fascism.
If it were about liberating the ethnic Russians oppressed by Ukraine they would not be so happy with a slow churning meat grinder approach, they would do what the west does and destroy country-wide infrastructural.
The slow approach is precisely because they want to avoid damaging large swathes of the country and causing massive civilian casualties. This way the damage remains relatively restricted to the area around the line of contact, and the casualties are overwhelmingly military. This conflict has one of the lowest civilian to military casualties in any modern conflict. I won’t even compare it to Gaza because that is not a war, it’s a genocide, but even something like the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, the Syrian civil war, the Vietnam war, the Korean war, etc. all had way, way higher ratios of civilian casualties.
If they went all out in the way you suggest that would be a sure recipe for turning the population of Ukraine against Russia more efficiently than a decade of the anti-Russian Banderite propaganda has done. Ukraine right now is struggling with a huge desertion problem and a lack of volunteers so serious that they are having to resort to insanely abusive forced mobilization practices. If Russia launched a campaign against the civilian infrastructure all they would be doing is motivating millions more Ukrainians to fight, and that would prolong the conflict far more than the current careful and methodical approach.
At the end of this Russia doesn’t want to have a destroyed country full of radicalized Russia hating people on their border. They want to have a friendly or at least neutral, semi-functional, stable country whose population has grown disillusioned with the entire Banderite project. Meanwhile on the front they continue to eliminates the most radicalized and fanatic ones who can’t be turned.
Russia is still a capitalist country that uses its military for its own interests, not anti-fascism
We agree that the potential threat of Ukraine as a militarized bordering state is what concerned and concerns Russian leadership the most. You argue that the slow meat grinder is better psychologically and for Russia’s long-term interests against a hostile militarized state on its borders. I agree with this as well. My point was that the invasion was and is not about rapidly ending the progressive ethnic cleansing done by UA in Donbas and elsewhere, but for Russian strategic interests. Going for a proper rapid “win” by disabling production and infrastructure would be a more reasonable direction to take if the goal was to protect Donbas alone.
Of course, the ethnic cleansing in Donbas was a motiving factor, but less because of Russia having some kind of principled position against ethnic cleansing, but because it is a literal war zone and training ground for advancing anti-Russian interests and power. In the end it is good that these interests align, I am just saying it is a mistake to think that Russia is motivated by ethnic cleansing itself.
In terms of anti-fascist, I am again speaking to motives. In effect they are killing off many UA Nazis and that is great. But in motivation they truly do not care, it is just a PR thing that has very popular national liberation aesthetics (USSR defeating the Nazis). This is a good example of why the support is critical! Of course we want the end of UA Nazis and I’m supportive of that, truly. But we do have to remember that the RF is itself capitalist (and reactionary!) and is anti-imperialist only to the extent that it is excluded from the party. So we defend it against liberal chauvinist bullshiy and attempts to take blame away from the imperialists, but also amongst ourselves must understand the extent to which it directly opposes our projects, interests, and comrades.
In the end it is good that these interests align, I am just saying it is a mistake to think that Russia is motivated by ethnic cleansing itself.
I agree. But it is a fact that the underlying strategic interests do align with the humanitarian imperative in this case.
This is important because the humanitarian argument is a better and more persuasive argument to make to liberals than the geostrategic argument.
So we defend it against liberal chauvinist bullshiy and attempts to take blame away from the imperialists, but also amongst ourselves must understand the extent to which it directly opposes our projects, interests, and comrades.
Ah yes, the sterling and unassailable anti-imperialism of… checks notes …Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I am sorry man but what?
Most sides in most wars are bad. Just because they are fighting your current enemy doesn’t make them good. It makes them, at best, a lesser evil and an ally of convenience. If todays Russia had the global position to do so, they would create their own version of Nato and it would be just as imperialist as Nato is. Just because they used to be cool 40 years ago, doesn’t make them cool now.
Ukrainian-nazi-NATO defenders should be banned on site IMO. Just like we should ban anyone taking the middle ground on Israel. Or the middle ground on bigotry.
One side in all cases is objectively correct and it’s highly suspicious “leftists” years into this conflict are still using talking points straight from the Pentagon.
Yes but the point is intent in this case. If what’s preventing a chud from chudding is a jail cell, does that stop them from being a chud? No it fucking doesn’t
They ally themselves with targets of imperialism, or I should say targets of imperialism often ally themselves with Russia, because they have a common enemy. It really doesn’t have anything to do with an ideology that died in that country decades ago. China actually does domestic shit that’s respectable which is what’s given them the ability to contend with western influence and financial power
Russia is susceptible to western interference because they’re much weaker than they once were, and so they’re forced into preemptive action (which is not wrong), but it’s not out of some anti-imperialist ideology, it’s for their own sovereignty. Just because those actions are taken doesn’t make them anti-imperialist.
I mean the blind and uncritical faith in both Russia and China simply because they are aligned against a foe completely discounts their significant differences in the modern day, and frankly it’s insulting to China’s progress to even lump them together. Russia hasn’t just swapped places with China in the US-Russia-China relationship, it’s swapped places but is in a decline; it doesn’t have potential anymore. Its leadership has failed from a starting point significantly more privileged than China’s, it cannot fend off western influence outside of physical war, of which most if not all is entirely preemptive which begs the question, was all of it necessary, since it creates yet another drain on their workforce and people?
Frankly I don’t even think the west really considers them very threatening outside of their locale. Current power is dominated by finance. China understands that, and China’s decisions put them in a position to fight on a front that matters. Most western rhetoric on Russia is in an attempt to divert public funds towards private arms companies, not to stunt a legitimate threat. Their investment in Ukraine is more a dumping ground for old equipment than anything else, and to prevent a short-term engagement that might spread beyond that, that would be considered short term because Russia’s population is in literal decline and has been for decades because their domestic policy has generated nothing for their people besides extraction. The Soviet Union collapsed and is still being looted, and the call is predominantly coming from inside the house
It really doesn’t have anything to do with an ideology that died in that country decades ago.
Communism isn’t as dead in Russia as you think. There are far more communist sympathies in Russia than there are in any other western or post-Soviet country. The communist party is the biggest opposition to the ruling party.
China actually does domestic shit that’s respectable which is what’s given them the ability to contend with western influence and financial power
China and Russia are more alike than you might think. China is not a perfect socialist country, it has a very active market economy, and a lot of capitalistic elements to their economy, albeit always with the state having the final word and making sure capital doesn’t get out of line. Russia is not a perfect capitalist country. They have a fairly large state owned sector, especially in military and resource extraction industries, and the state at times exercises strong control over the economy to discipline rogue capitalists. China has a socialist ruling party and Russia a capitalist one, but in practice their economies are closer to each other than they are to the neoliberal West.
they’re forced into preemptive action (which is not wrong), but it’s not out of some anti-imperialist ideology, it’s for their own sovereignty. Just because those actions are taken doesn’t make them anti-imperialist.
I think here there are just differing philosophical views on the importance of intent vs practical results. What good is good intent if the results are objectively bad? And if the results are objectively good, does it really matter what the intent is?
I mean the blind and uncritical faith in both Russia and China simply because they are aligned against a foe completely discounts their significant differences in the modern day, and frankly it’s insulting to China’s progress to even lump them together
I don’t think we should have uncritical faith in either of them. In Russia’s case it should definitely be critical support.
And yes the two countries are very different. Russia is certainly not the USSR. But Russia is for all intents and purposes allied with China, and the two countries have complementary strengths. Russia is a raw material superpower with a very advanced military industry. In many ways Russian military technology is still ahead of both the US and China, even if it’s not as big by sheer size. It’s also about as close to self-sufficient as a country can get. China on the other hand is a manufacturing and technology superpower. Each has what the other needs. This partnership is not going away any time soon. Their relationship is only deepening.
Most western rhetoric on Russia is in an attempt to divert public funds towards private arms companies
True. But a defeat in the Ukraine proxy war would still be extremely destabilizing for them. Due to the sheer amount of money and political capital that they have invested into this conflict, it would be viewed as a humiliating defeat of NATO and the EU, and both organizations risk falling apart as a result.
Russia’s population is in literal decline and has been for decades because their domestic policy has generated nothing for their people besides extraction
Pretty much all European countries are struggling with their demographics and for the most part the growth they do have is thanks to immigration. China’s situation is not much better in this regard either. But i don’t think this is as big of a deal as it is made out to be. Russia isn’t going to run out of people and neither is Europe and neither is China.
Also, you should not underestimate the level of recovery that Russia has achieved compared to where they were 25 years ago. Russia today is not the Russia of the 1990s. There are a lot of problems but from what i can tell the mood seems to be generally optimistic. They have solid growth, they are regrowing their domestic industries as a result of the sanctions, living standards have greatly improved, and their international standing outside of the collective West is very good.
Whether this is sustainable in the long term remains to be seen. They may need to take a page out of China’s playbook and copy some of China’s policies and development strategies. But if that is the case then they are well positioned to do it, with a communist party as the second biggest independent political force in the country, and with China right next door to look to and gain inspiration from.
If a nation’s material position forces them into an anti-imperialist stance then their ideology will follow. The opposite is true as well - of a nation’s material position allies them with imperialism then their ideology will follow.
If ideology is downstream from material reality then why has material reality over the course of all human history begged for a more equitable distribution of resources among its laborers, but no nation has ever ended up with an ideology that made that a reality (China still pending)?
Material reality does influence ideology. In that those who control the means dictate the ideology much, much more often than not, with an occasional revolution that very often ends up with the same dichotomy between owner and worker.
Do not conflate nation with people, as very often a nation is represented by a very thin margin of elites pretending to represent the interests of their “people”. And very often from a failed state comes corpse-picking vultures who understand the economic situation and trajectory their nation is in, and the economic situation they are personally in, and take advantage of it for good reason.
Ideology is only downstream from your perception of reality if
that reality is a revolution among labor, not among elites. Last I checked the Soviet Union falling wasn’t one driven by its labor. Its ideology is aligned with its elite material interests, since it’s very much owned by its elites. Barring some occasional theatrics, Putin is not the people’s president. And that’s not because he’s a permanent ruler, I understand the necessity of one in the face of stronger imperialist forces, it’s because he’s a shitty leader
Look at WW2. France and the UK fought the Nazis and that’s a good thing. Does it excuse the clearly evil shit they did as colonial powers before WW2, during or after? Fuck no. No need to carry water for them, no need to carry water for post USSR Russia.
You only proved that changing material conditions changes material conditions. Why does it matter what one would or wouldn’t do in a hypothetical scenario that exists in only in your brain.
It doesn’t matter what they would do, we can speculate all day about intentions and alternate universes. All that matters is what they are doing right now in the real world that we live in. Russia is allied with China, Iran, the DPRK, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Mali, Burkina Faso, etc. All targets of US imperialism. They support and are supported by all socialist or socialist adjacent countries.
The fact is that at the moment Russia is one of the biggest anti-imperialist forces in the world, and certainly the one doing most of the heavy lifting in terms of actually militarily taking on the imperialists and their proxies. They are militarily supporting anti-imperialist governments all over the world. They are killing more fascists each day than anyone else on the planet. And they are second only to China in their contribution to upending US hegemony.
If February 2022 didn’t happen we would be living in a very different world today, one in which US imperialism would still be in a much stronger position. The SMO has been and continues to be, objectively, a historic game changer and immensely positive contribution to the global anti-imperialist cause. Vladimir Putin’s personal ideological inclinations don’t change these factual realities. He has no choice but to act according to the geopolitical circumstances that Russia finds itself in.
I can still stan neither the US, nor Russian, now Ukraine. They can all be bad to a point where I don’t want to cheer for them. I will cheer for China any day though, or the other countries you mentioned. Russia is just a bit too reactionary for me, which is only likely to change once Putin stops leading the place.
And yes, they happen to be a target of imperialism by the US, mainly because the US is incapable of letting anything go and the average hog still equates russian with communist, which is not Russia’s fault. Them having allied with the block of countries that oppose the US/West globally is a pretty obvious move, since they have no other potential allies. in that sense they are indeed anti-imperialist, but that is like saying Hitler was an Anti-Imperialist for wanting to conquer France and the UK.
I will cheer for China any day though, or the other countries you mentioned. Russia is just a bit too reactionary for me
Iran is objectively more reactionary than Russia and we still critically support them.
that is like saying Hitler was an Anti-Imperialist for wanting to conquer France and the UK.
No, it’s the opposite. Nazi Germany was the bigger imperialist threat at the time. At the time we would have expressed, as most communists did, critical support to France and the UK, despite them being imperialist, in the war against the Nazis.
What do you think of the kidnapping children thing? I know they’ve cooperated with humanitarian organizations, but I think only a low two digit number of children were reunited this way. Obviously leaving a child in a warzone would be more barbaric than the common claims about what is actually happening, but your position seems to effectively be that Russia is not, on a systemic level, doing anything especially wrong, so I assume you have a much stronger claim.
For the record, this isn’t a “gotcha,” I am asking thinking you probably do have pertinent information here that I don’t, even if we might not 100% agree on how to interpret it.
Look here, after years of Ukraine and western media spreading the lies about tens to hundreds thousands of “kidnapped children” and Russia demanding names so they can be found, and taking UN comissioner as middleman, Ukraine finally provided a list of… 339 names, of which 161 was already found living in Germany.
What “kidnapping children”? Russia asked Ukraine to provide a list of names of the alleged “kidnapped” children, of which Ukraine and its western backers claim there are thousands if not tens of thousands, and they have failed to provide anything close to that.
Yes there are Russian speaking children from the affected areas who have lost their parents as a result of the war. Very often due to Ukraine’s terrorist tactics such as shelling civilian areas under Russian control, systematically using Russian speaking civilians as human shields against their will (this is amply attested by thousands of witness testimonies from the people in the liberated cities), kidnapping men off the streets, or just plain executing Russian speaking civilians who the Ukrainian Nazi brigades view as traitors for choosing to wait for the Russians. And undoubtedly in a war zone you will also have incidents of children simply becoming separated from their parents in the chaos.
But Russia has a humanitarian obligation to protect civilians, especially children, by removing them from active combat zones, and if they are children giving them stable housing and education until the parents or other relatives who are still alive come to claim them. And many of these children’s families are already in Russia or Russian controlled territory already so it’s usually not a problem. There have been several stories in Russian media about children being reunited with their parents, even with parents travelling from Ukraine to Russia to look for them, and the families usually choose to stay in Russia afterwards since it is much safer.
What Russia is not going to do is release potentially orphaned children to the Nazi regime in Kiev, when Ukraine is notoriously Europe’s human trafficking capital, without solid guarantees that these children will actually go to their parents and not end up in a trafficking situation. There are too many horrific stories from Ukrainians themselves about children just disappearing in their corrupt systems. There was even a report about children who Ukraine claimed Russia had “kidnapped” somehow turning up in Germany. I’m sorry but protecting those children is more important than giving in to the Kiev regime’s hysterics just to score PR points with the West.
I appreciate the response. Do you have any sources you can direct me to for the claims you made about what’s going on?
I tried to make it clear in my original comment that getting kids out of a war zone, even if NAFO hysteria was completely true and they were put in Russification residential schools and deliberately kept from their parents (which I don’t necessarily believe, I’m just using this as an example), would still be much better than leaving them in the war zone, even if it would merit severe criticism.
But it sounds like NAFO dorks are tabulating “kidnapped children” using roughly the same methodology as their tabulation of holodomor deaths, i.e. using an extremely flimsy interpretation of statistics to invent ridiculous accusations centered on victims who they don’t seem to have any specific idea about the existence of.
Here an article from a Donbass publication on trafficking networks in Ukraine. And here is an investigative piece implicating the Zelensky regime.
And there is more in Russian language media if you know how to look for it. Most browsers have a translation feature so the language barrier is generally not a big problem nowadays. Here are some examples:
The machine translation i got is a bit odd in places but it's good enough:
When the Ukrainian side eventually handed over the list of those same «stolen children», it contained only 339 names — not thousands and, of course, not millions, as they have been claiming in Kiev all these years.
But no one kidnapped these children either. They were evacuated and rescued by Russian soldiers. Every child whose legal representative was found returns to his family, Medinsky emphasized.
«From a similar list, children recently ended up in Germany, but claims were made by the Russian Federation. This shameful PR campaign must stop. All families will reunite, it’s a matter of honor», — he added.
Those same children — 161 children from Ukraine were found evacuated to Germany a year ago, which was confirmed by the head of the National Police of Ukraine Ivan Vygovsky. At the same time, for two years in a row, all world media wrote about «kidnapped», in the mildest wording — «children forcibly deported» to Russia and Belarus.
[…]
The Ukrainian authorities and propagandists tried to present the evacuation of children from the combat zone as an act of «genocide». There were even theses that these children, temporarily staying with their families in sanatoriums and boarding houses on the Black Sea, would lose «their Ukrainian cultural identity».
In reality, the process of family reunification did not stop throughout the entire period of the SVO. The children met with their relatives through the mediation of Qatar, Belarus and other countries, as regularly reported by the Ombudsman’s Office. Moreover, the Ukrainian Ombudsman Dmitry Lubinets — too.
[…]
If Kiev is worried about their safety, the Ukrainian authorities should be happy when children are away from hostilities and evacuated. However, no. Ukrainian and European volunteer communities were shocked by the news this week: children with disabilities who were evacuated back in 2022 were returned to Ukraine from Austria.
[…]
Austrian social services were shocked by this decision. Until now, the children lived safely in the special SeneCura institution in Burgauberg-Neudauberg under the supervision of Ukrainian specialists.
Former Secretary of State of the Austrian People’s Party Christine Marek she wrote an open letter to the Ukrainian ambassador, calling «’s decision absolutely incomprehensible» and threatening the well-being of children. A representative of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Vienna also expressed concern Christoph Pinter.
But neither this nor dozens of indignant articles in the Austrian media helped. On June 1, the children were taken away, and stories spread through Ukrainian volunteer chats about how carelessly, without complying with any medical requirements, they were taken to Kropyvnytskyi.
A year ago, the Ukrainian authorities wanted in the same way to return orphans from Berdyansk who had been evacuated to the Italian province of Bergamo. Fortunately, the juvenile court of the city of Brescia prohibited this, the children were extended their placement in local centers and left under the protection of Rome
How are they a bad guy? They are defending themselves against imperialist encroachment and fighting against a murderous Nazi regime.
For the first time since the end of the USSR a non-Western power is openly confronting the collective West and winning, both militarily and economically. They have shown the entire world what a paper tiger NATO is, which in turn emboldens others to stand up to the imperialists instead of cowering in fear.
They are liberating an oppressed people from fascism while at the same time depleting NATO arsenals that would otherwise be used to murder people all across the global south, costing the West billions and trapping them in a losing quagmire from which they cannot escape. And last but not least they are keeping the US distracted and buying China time to be even better prepared for any future confrontation in the Pacific.
All of these things are objectively good from an anti-imperialist perspective.
Russia is not fighting a war of liberation, it is a war for regional strategic purposes. If it were about liberating the ethnic Russians oppressed by Ukraine they would not be so happy with a slow churning meat grinder approach, they would do what the west does and destroy country-wide infrastructural. The war is about taking out Ukraine as a threat, a forward base for NATO interests. That they will increasingly provide security for the people of Donbas is good.
We critically support Russia against UA because they’re US/NATO pawns that were doing preliminary ethnic cleansing and being used to poke Russia, and because we usually live in Russophobic countries where absurd lies about the war prevail, but Russia is still a capitalist country that uses its military for its own interests, not anti-fascism.
The slow approach is precisely because they want to avoid damaging large swathes of the country and causing massive civilian casualties. This way the damage remains relatively restricted to the area around the line of contact, and the casualties are overwhelmingly military. This conflict has one of the lowest civilian to military casualties in any modern conflict. I won’t even compare it to Gaza because that is not a war, it’s a genocide, but even something like the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, the Syrian civil war, the Vietnam war, the Korean war, etc. all had way, way higher ratios of civilian casualties.
If they went all out in the way you suggest that would be a sure recipe for turning the population of Ukraine against Russia more efficiently than a decade of the anti-Russian Banderite propaganda has done. Ukraine right now is struggling with a huge desertion problem and a lack of volunteers so serious that they are having to resort to insanely abusive forced mobilization practices. If Russia launched a campaign against the civilian infrastructure all they would be doing is motivating millions more Ukrainians to fight, and that would prolong the conflict far more than the current careful and methodical approach.
At the end of this Russia doesn’t want to have a destroyed country full of radicalized Russia hating people on their border. They want to have a friendly or at least neutral, semi-functional, stable country whose population has grown disillusioned with the entire Banderite project. Meanwhile on the front they continue to eliminates the most radicalized and fanatic ones who can’t be turned.
Both can be true.
We agree that the potential threat of Ukraine as a militarized bordering state is what concerned and concerns Russian leadership the most. You argue that the slow meat grinder is better psychologically and for Russia’s long-term interests against a hostile militarized state on its borders. I agree with this as well. My point was that the invasion was and is not about rapidly ending the progressive ethnic cleansing done by UA in Donbas and elsewhere, but for Russian strategic interests. Going for a proper rapid “win” by disabling production and infrastructure would be a more reasonable direction to take if the goal was to protect Donbas alone.
Of course, the ethnic cleansing in Donbas was a motiving factor, but less because of Russia having some kind of principled position against ethnic cleansing, but because it is a literal war zone and training ground for advancing anti-Russian interests and power. In the end it is good that these interests align, I am just saying it is a mistake to think that Russia is motivated by ethnic cleansing itself.
In terms of anti-fascist, I am again speaking to motives. In effect they are killing off many UA Nazis and that is great. But in motivation they truly do not care, it is just a PR thing that has very popular national liberation aesthetics (USSR defeating the Nazis). This is a good example of why the support is critical! Of course we want the end of UA Nazis and I’m supportive of that, truly. But we do have to remember that the RF is itself capitalist (and reactionary!) and is anti-imperialist only to the extent that it is excluded from the party. So we defend it against liberal chauvinist bullshiy and attempts to take blame away from the imperialists, but also amongst ourselves must understand the extent to which it directly opposes our projects, interests, and comrades.
I agree. But it is a fact that the underlying strategic interests do align with the humanitarian imperative in this case.
This is important because the humanitarian argument is a better and more persuasive argument to make to liberals than the geostrategic argument.
Of course. Hence critical support.
Yes 100% comrade
Ah yes, the sterling and unassailable anti-imperialism of… checks notes …Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I am sorry man but what?
Most sides in most wars are bad. Just because they are fighting your current enemy doesn’t make them good. It makes them, at best, a lesser evil and an ally of convenience. If todays Russia had the global position to do so, they would create their own version of Nato and it would be just as imperialist as Nato is. Just because they used to be cool 40 years ago, doesn’t make them cool now.
“If Russia’s historical and material conditions were different, it would be different.”
This is what happens when ZPoster gets banned (again).
Ukrainian-nazi-NATO defenders should be banned on site IMO. Just like we should ban anyone taking the middle ground on Israel. Or the middle ground on bigotry.
One side in all cases is objectively correct and it’s highly suspicious “leftists” years into this conflict are still using talking points straight from the Pentagon.
Yes but the point is intent in this case. If what’s preventing a chud from chudding is a jail cell, does that stop them from being a chud? No it fucking doesn’t
They ally themselves with targets of imperialism, or I should say targets of imperialism often ally themselves with Russia, because they have a common enemy. It really doesn’t have anything to do with an ideology that died in that country decades ago. China actually does domestic shit that’s respectable which is what’s given them the ability to contend with western influence and financial power
Russia is susceptible to western interference because they’re much weaker than they once were, and so they’re forced into preemptive action (which is not wrong), but it’s not out of some anti-imperialist ideology, it’s for their own sovereignty. Just because those actions are taken doesn’t make them anti-imperialist.
I mean the blind and uncritical faith in both Russia and China simply because they are aligned against a foe completely discounts their significant differences in the modern day, and frankly it’s insulting to China’s progress to even lump them together. Russia hasn’t just swapped places with China in the US-Russia-China relationship, it’s swapped places but is in a decline; it doesn’t have potential anymore. Its leadership has failed from a starting point significantly more privileged than China’s, it cannot fend off western influence outside of physical war, of which most if not all is entirely preemptive which begs the question, was all of it necessary, since it creates yet another drain on their workforce and people?
Frankly I don’t even think the west really considers them very threatening outside of their locale. Current power is dominated by finance. China understands that, and China’s decisions put them in a position to fight on a front that matters. Most western rhetoric on Russia is in an attempt to divert public funds towards private arms companies, not to stunt a legitimate threat. Their investment in Ukraine is more a dumping ground for old equipment than anything else, and to prevent a short-term engagement that might spread beyond that, that would be considered short term because Russia’s population is in literal decline and has been for decades because their domestic policy has generated nothing for their people besides extraction. The Soviet Union collapsed and is still being looted, and the call is predominantly coming from inside the house
Communism isn’t as dead in Russia as you think. There are far more communist sympathies in Russia than there are in any other western or post-Soviet country. The communist party is the biggest opposition to the ruling party.
China and Russia are more alike than you might think. China is not a perfect socialist country, it has a very active market economy, and a lot of capitalistic elements to their economy, albeit always with the state having the final word and making sure capital doesn’t get out of line. Russia is not a perfect capitalist country. They have a fairly large state owned sector, especially in military and resource extraction industries, and the state at times exercises strong control over the economy to discipline rogue capitalists. China has a socialist ruling party and Russia a capitalist one, but in practice their economies are closer to each other than they are to the neoliberal West.
I think here there are just differing philosophical views on the importance of intent vs practical results. What good is good intent if the results are objectively bad? And if the results are objectively good, does it really matter what the intent is?
I don’t think we should have uncritical faith in either of them. In Russia’s case it should definitely be critical support.
And yes the two countries are very different. Russia is certainly not the USSR. But Russia is for all intents and purposes allied with China, and the two countries have complementary strengths. Russia is a raw material superpower with a very advanced military industry. In many ways Russian military technology is still ahead of both the US and China, even if it’s not as big by sheer size. It’s also about as close to self-sufficient as a country can get. China on the other hand is a manufacturing and technology superpower. Each has what the other needs. This partnership is not going away any time soon. Their relationship is only deepening.
True. But a defeat in the Ukraine proxy war would still be extremely destabilizing for them. Due to the sheer amount of money and political capital that they have invested into this conflict, it would be viewed as a humiliating defeat of NATO and the EU, and both organizations risk falling apart as a result.
Pretty much all European countries are struggling with their demographics and for the most part the growth they do have is thanks to immigration. China’s situation is not much better in this regard either. But i don’t think this is as big of a deal as it is made out to be. Russia isn’t going to run out of people and neither is Europe and neither is China.
Also, you should not underestimate the level of recovery that Russia has achieved compared to where they were 25 years ago. Russia today is not the Russia of the 1990s. There are a lot of problems but from what i can tell the mood seems to be generally optimistic. They have solid growth, they are regrowing their domestic industries as a result of the sanctions, living standards have greatly improved, and their international standing outside of the collective West is very good.
Whether this is sustainable in the long term remains to be seen. They may need to take a page out of China’s playbook and copy some of China’s policies and development strategies. But if that is the case then they are well positioned to do it, with a communist party as the second biggest independent political force in the country, and with China right next door to look to and gain inspiration from.
If a nation’s material position forces them into an anti-imperialist stance then their ideology will follow. The opposite is true as well - of a nation’s material position allies them with imperialism then their ideology will follow.
Ideology is downstream from material reality.
If ideology is downstream from material reality then why has material reality over the course of all human history begged for a more equitable distribution of resources among its laborers, but no nation has ever ended up with an ideology that made that a reality (China still pending)?
Material reality does influence ideology. In that those who control the means dictate the ideology much, much more often than not, with an occasional revolution that very often ends up with the same dichotomy between owner and worker.
Do not conflate nation with people, as very often a nation is represented by a very thin margin of elites pretending to represent the interests of their “people”. And very often from a failed state comes corpse-picking vultures who understand the economic situation and trajectory their nation is in, and the economic situation they are personally in, and take advantage of it for good reason.
Ideology is only downstream from your perception of reality if that reality is a revolution among labor, not among elites. Last I checked the Soviet Union falling wasn’t one driven by its labor. Its ideology is aligned with its elite material interests, since it’s very much owned by its elites. Barring some occasional theatrics, Putin is not the people’s president. And that’s not because he’s a permanent ruler, I understand the necessity of one in the face of stronger imperialist forces, it’s because he’s a shitty leader
Yea and if I had wheels I’d be a wagon.
Look at WW2. France and the UK fought the Nazis and that’s a good thing. Does it excuse the clearly evil shit they did as colonial powers before WW2, during or after? Fuck no. No need to carry water for them, no need to carry water for post USSR Russia.
WW2 and modern day are two completely different world dynamics. You can’t just compare Russia in 2025 to the UK 80 years ago.
so making things up counts as analysis now?
This is funny to me. Yea, Putin would totally usher in world commulism if only he could reach that button my guy.
It doesn’t matter what they would do, we can speculate all day about intentions and alternate universes. All that matters is what they are doing right now in the real world that we live in. Russia is allied with China, Iran, the DPRK, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Mali, Burkina Faso, etc. All targets of US imperialism. They support and are supported by all socialist or socialist adjacent countries.
The fact is that at the moment Russia is one of the biggest anti-imperialist forces in the world, and certainly the one doing most of the heavy lifting in terms of actually militarily taking on the imperialists and their proxies. They are militarily supporting anti-imperialist governments all over the world. They are killing more fascists each day than anyone else on the planet. And they are second only to China in their contribution to upending US hegemony.
If February 2022 didn’t happen we would be living in a very different world today, one in which US imperialism would still be in a much stronger position. The SMO has been and continues to be, objectively, a historic game changer and immensely positive contribution to the global anti-imperialist cause. Vladimir Putin’s personal ideological inclinations don’t change these factual realities. He has no choice but to act according to the geopolitical circumstances that Russia finds itself in.
I can still stan neither the US, nor Russian, now Ukraine. They can all be bad to a point where I don’t want to cheer for them. I will cheer for China any day though, or the other countries you mentioned. Russia is just a bit too reactionary for me, which is only likely to change once Putin stops leading the place.
And yes, they happen to be a target of imperialism by the US, mainly because the US is incapable of letting anything go and the average hog still equates russian with communist, which is not Russia’s fault. Them having allied with the block of countries that oppose the US/West globally is a pretty obvious move, since they have no other potential allies. in that sense they are indeed anti-imperialist, but that is like saying Hitler was an Anti-Imperialist for wanting to conquer France and the UK.
Iran is objectively more reactionary than Russia and we still critically support them.
No, it’s the opposite. Nazi Germany was the bigger imperialist threat at the time. At the time we would have expressed, as most communists did, critical support to France and the UK, despite them being imperialist, in the war against the Nazis.
What do you think of the kidnapping children thing? I know they’ve cooperated with humanitarian organizations, but I think only a low two digit number of children were reunited this way. Obviously leaving a child in a warzone would be more barbaric than the common claims about what is actually happening, but your position seems to effectively be that Russia is not, on a systemic level, doing anything especially wrong, so I assume you have a much stronger claim.
For the record, this isn’t a “gotcha,” I am asking thinking you probably do have pertinent information here that I don’t, even if we might not 100% agree on how to interpret it.
Look here, after years of Ukraine and western media spreading the lies about tens to hundreds thousands of “kidnapped children” and Russia demanding names so they can be found, and taking UN comissioner as middleman, Ukraine finally provided a list of… 339 names, of which 161 was already found living in Germany.
What “kidnapping children”? Russia asked Ukraine to provide a list of names of the alleged “kidnapped” children, of which Ukraine and its western backers claim there are thousands if not tens of thousands, and they have failed to provide anything close to that.
Yes there are Russian speaking children from the affected areas who have lost their parents as a result of the war. Very often due to Ukraine’s terrorist tactics such as shelling civilian areas under Russian control, systematically using Russian speaking civilians as human shields against their will (this is amply attested by thousands of witness testimonies from the people in the liberated cities), kidnapping men off the streets, or just plain executing Russian speaking civilians who the Ukrainian Nazi brigades view as traitors for choosing to wait for the Russians. And undoubtedly in a war zone you will also have incidents of children simply becoming separated from their parents in the chaos.
But Russia has a humanitarian obligation to protect civilians, especially children, by removing them from active combat zones, and if they are children giving them stable housing and education until the parents or other relatives who are still alive come to claim them. And many of these children’s families are already in Russia or Russian controlled territory already so it’s usually not a problem. There have been several stories in Russian media about children being reunited with their parents, even with parents travelling from Ukraine to Russia to look for them, and the families usually choose to stay in Russia afterwards since it is much safer.
What Russia is not going to do is release potentially orphaned children to the Nazi regime in Kiev, when Ukraine is notoriously Europe’s human trafficking capital, without solid guarantees that these children will actually go to their parents and not end up in a trafficking situation. There are too many horrific stories from Ukrainians themselves about children just disappearing in their corrupt systems. There was even a report about children who Ukraine claimed Russia had “kidnapped” somehow turning up in Germany. I’m sorry but protecting those children is more important than giving in to the Kiev regime’s hysterics just to score PR points with the West.
I appreciate the response. Do you have any sources you can direct me to for the claims you made about what’s going on?
I tried to make it clear in my original comment that getting kids out of a war zone, even if NAFO hysteria was completely true and they were put in Russification residential schools and deliberately kept from their parents (which I don’t necessarily believe, I’m just using this as an example), would still be much better than leaving them in the war zone, even if it would merit severe criticism.
But it sounds like NAFO dorks are tabulating “kidnapped children” using roughly the same methodology as their tabulation of holodomor deaths, i.e. using an extremely flimsy interpretation of statistics to invent ridiculous accusations centered on victims who they don’t seem to have any specific idea about the existence of.
This is probably the most thorough debunking of the entire thing i’ve read so far.
Some other articles on the topic:
“Accusations of child “kidnapping” by Russia have proven to be lies. Ukrainian children found in Germany”
“The Fake ‘Kidnapping’ Probe: How the West Covered for Ukraine’s Child Trafficking Networks”
Here an article from a Donbass publication on trafficking networks in Ukraine. And here is an investigative piece implicating the Zelensky regime.
And there is more in Russian language media if you know how to look for it. Most browsers have a translation feature so the language barrier is generally not a big problem nowadays. Here are some examples:
“339 evacuees. Ukrainian show about «stolen children» failed”
The machine translation i got is a bit odd in places but it's good enough:
[…]
[…]
[…]
“«They were saved by a Russian soldier». How children from the combat zone were returned to their families”
“Ukraine has turned into a “black market” for child trafficking to the West”