Here’s how Ukraine was being reported by the West before the war.
Today, increasing reports of far-right violence, ultranationalism, and erosion of basic freedoms are giving the lie to the West’s initial euphoria. There are neo-Nazi pogroms against the Roma, rampant attacks on feminists and LGBT groups, book bans, and state-sponsored glorification of Nazi collaborators.
These stories of Ukraine’s dark nationalism aren’t coming out of Moscow; they’re being filed by Western media, including US-funded Radio Free Europe (RFE); Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Center; and watchdogs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House, which issued a joint report warning that Kiev is losing the monopoly on the use of force in the country as far-right gangs operate with impunity.
Five years after Maidan, the beacon of democracy is looking more like a torchlight march. A neo-Nazi battalion in the heart of Europe
If you whitewash NAZI POGROMS just because you want to beat Russia, fuck you. Siding with far-right fascists to defeat far-right fascists doesn’t make you the good guy. There is no lesser of two evils here.
If you dismiss any criticism of Ukraine as Russian propaganda, you might want to ask why the rest of the world, including the West, was concerned about Nazism in the area and then suddenly changed their tune only after the war started.
We should be getting both sides into peace negotiations, not prolonging the bloodshed and providing Nazis with illegal cluster bombs
Read, comrade!
Ok not trying to be a lib here but doesn’t Russia have concentrated capital in the hands of its bourgeoisie, and is using the very real existence of Ukrainian Nazis to justify asserting control over its Ukrainian oil interests? To my eyes there’s really not a good guy in this situation, it’s imperial territorial pissing all the way down, comparable the first world war. In fact I would say the shock therapy Russia went through in the 90s locked them into an imperialist political economy, since it was essentially an exact reversal of what Lenin is advocating here
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.