We’ve got every photo of Ukrainian troops as evidence they’re largely Nazis. We’ve even got public statements by Ukrainian senior leadership about exterminating Russians and sympathizers in any territory they recapture. What’s your proof the same is true about Russian troops or leadership? As far as I’m aware, this “Wagner are Nazis” theory comes from one single picture of the shit bag who used to be in charge of Wagner but isn’t any longer.

edit: while I’m thinking about it - what is your obsession with Putin? Do you understand that the war is popular in Russia? That Putin is more popular now than he was before the war? That a very common sentiment in Russian elected government and the citizenry is that the war hasn’t been prosecuted hard enough? If Putin were couped by Russians the war would almost certainly get kicked into high gear and the Russians would start honestly trying to capture all of Ukraine. This great man theory obsession with Putin himself is just off the mark.

I don’t agree with your analysis, but to take your example for a moment I’d argue that sending nazis into a meat grinder of a war to fight other nazis is a pretty good way to kill two birds with one stone.

You should check out parenti he has a quote about this:

During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.

You’re just going to assume anything Putin or Russia says is wrong and bad. There’s no logic or rationality in your worldview - you have decided Putin is a Bad Man and will for any new information into this preconceived notion.

There are some missing pieces that would be necessary to recognize them as fully imperialist. Imperialism also involves export of capital to subject countries in order to turn them into export economies for the imperialist. It also involves the imperialist countries competing to divide the world into more or less mutually exclusive spheres of exploitation. To my knowledge, Russia’s economic mode does not principally involve export of capital or maintaining any neo-colonies.

Russia is locked into a bourgeois political economy and its principal mode is industrial capitalism. It has not (yet) made the qualitative transition into the imperialist mode, which isn’t to say that it could not do so or lacks the necessary preconditions. My understanding is very basic, I’m not claiming to be an expert on this topic, but hopefully that helps explain why people jumped on your rump about this.

Russia already had a majority control over Ukrainian oil interests because they have the bargaining power of being (and this is still true btw, during wartime) Ukriane’s main supplier of natural gas. They could have, and it probably would have been smarter economically, for them to, bargain with the Ukrainian government, trading the political rights of the Donbass for control over the oil. But that is not what this war is about. This war is primarily about NATO, geo-political control, and the fact that it would have been massively unpopular and incredibly disruptive for Russia to give up the Donbass, and what they were doing was not a long-term solution as long as Ukraine continues to arm themselves and politically bang the drum for a full-scale invasion. Whether or not that invasion was imminent in 2022 is unclear, as the Kiev government was completely taken by surprise by the Russian invasion, but also had been making huge rhetorical speeches about retaking the Donbass regions. It’s very unclear at the moment, and history may or may not provide clarification.

You aren’t incorrect that capital is concentrated in the hands of a national bourgeoisie, but that an imperialist economic model does not strictly make. As @panopticon@hexbear.net pointed out, being imperialist is about separating a ‘core’ from a ‘periphery’ and treating them as exclusive zones for exploitation. The development of Crimea for the last decade has shown that that isn’t what Russia does in areas they annex, they are simply incorporated into the ‘core’. Now we can argue about if their exploitation of the Chechens is imperialism, but even then, Russia is almost always trying to be an honest broker in their deals (with the continued natural gas trading to Ukriane is evidence for). They are capitalists and exploiters of their own people, but imperialists is abit of a stretch, from a Marxist-Leninist definition.