“If Hamas hadn’t attacked Israel on Oct. 7, the genocide could have been avoided. However, Israel was reinvigorated by the attack.”

“If Kim Il-sung hadn’t attacked the South in June of 1950, the Korean War could have been avoided. However, the US was reinvigorated by the invasion.”

Some conflicts are already baked in. Submitting to your oppressor isn’t the answer.

If Putin hadn’t invaded Ukraine, it would’ve been a launching ground for an invasion into Russia or forced submission. Trump isn’t wielding any more power than Biden who also demanded increased military spending.

NATO was always an imperialist organization made up of colonizer states eager to form a bloc against the spread of “gommunist USSR” which no longer exists. So now it is an entity that functions to serve the imperialists of the western hegemony. This was shown when Ukraine was couped by far-right nationalists with assistance from western intelligence to make a entity right on the edge of Russia’s border when it began distancing itself from the West. I’d argue Ukraine becoming a Nazi state was more of the fault here than anything Putin ever did.

Which, weirdly, Ukraine had a lot of support from nato states before in their little nazi adventure?? I wonder what that means.

Also, Time for the copypasta!

я не из калининграда@lemmy.ml (not a native english speaker, I believe)

i do not support the current administrations internal actions, as capitalism has brought nothing but injustice, suffering, poverty, crime and corruption. but i absolutely do support its foreign policy, especially regarding the ukrainian question. the putin government has evolved to become one of the most effective anti-imperialist forces on the planet and even if you ignore the terrible nature of the terrorist zelensky-regime one has to be grateful to our military for fighting the biggest enemy of mankind, america.

so lets detail the happenings that led to the current situation:

(it may be important to note that the current russian administration pushes a slightly different narrative due to sadly being a right wing state)

banderite collaborators parading in front of nazi officers the banderites (see picture), members of the fascist “organization of ukrainian nationalists” led by stepan andreyevich bandera were a gang of rapists and murderers who collaborated with the invading german hordes and assisted them by conducting acts of terror against civilians. It is important to note that popular support for them was close to zero. after the victory of the heroic red army, the majority of those parasites fled to the west, predominantly to canada. they received funding from american and british intelligence agencies, which were more than happy to welcome “former” nazis into their own anti-communist ranks. another subset of the banderites remained in the ukrainian ssr and conducted a campaign of terror and sabotage against the civilian population. their bloody deeds were supported by the cia and its european puppet agencies through the so called “operation aerodynamic”.

spoiler banderites

referendum on the preservation of the ussr. its results were ignored by the anti-communists

After the illegal and undemocratic dissolution of the ussr, the leaders of those fascist gangs were glorified by the ukrainian far-right, with support from the cia. efforts to further their “rehabilitation” were primarily directed by nazi expatriates in canada. outlets such as voice of america portrayed them as “heroes”. (aerodynamic, some of these were manufactured in the U.S under Operation Mockingbird like a lot of U.S state dept. bullshit)

results of the 2004 presidential election before cia intervention. this division between neonazi northwest and pro-russian southeast is visible to this day

in 2004, the west sabotaged the ukrainian presidential elections and installed their puppet, viktor andreyevich yushchenko, through a color revolution. he was a terrible leader, not only dismantling the remaining aspects of the ukrainian economy and managing to make life even more miserable than it already was, but also granting “hero of ukraine” status to banderite leaders and holocaust perpetrators stepan bandera and roman iosifovich shukhevich.

(not adding picture of 2014 ukrainian nazis since you have already said you believe in that)

in 2014, america and the west orchestrated another coup, this time not even bothering to hide the involvement of neo-nazis. the new regime perpetrated unspeakable atrocities against the russian population, whom it consideres “subhuman,” as well as against ukrainian anti-fascists. in odessa alone, 39 people were burned alive in the local trade union building.

those developments led to the revolution in the predominantly russian populated donbass-area and the creation off the donetsk and lugansk peoples republics, as well as the referendum in crimea that led to the peninsula finally rejoining russia. from 2014 till 2022 the majority of humanitarian aid to the donbass republics came from the cprf.

the reason for the smo is the ukrainian western-aligned nazi regime violating the minsk accords by refusing to demilitarize, trying to join the fascist nato-block and murdering russian civilians for years on end. the russian government showed itself extremely lenient, to lenient even, as any sensible politician would have staged a military intervention much earlier. if you need further proof for the tyrannical nature of the kievan regime just look at the fact that zelenskiy has banned all opposition parties in his country, refuses to hold elections and effectively rules as a military dictator. furthermore he has outlawed the russian language, made any negotiation with the russian state illegal and is currently selling whatever is left of his country to the highest bidder. combine all this with the fact that the west and its puppets need to always be opposed due to them being a cancer of humanity and you’ll get a pretty good picture of why to support the russian military.

---

[Query: Do communists have to support Russia?]

@davel@lemmygrad.ml

In a word, no. In a few more words, support for Russia (not Putin, as historical materialists don’t subscribe to great man theory) is only a partial, temporary, tactical one, in the context of imperialist liberation. Russia is still a capitalist state, though, so it’s a two stage strategy: first liberate colonized bourgeois states from colonizer states, and second revolution within those liberated bourgeois states.

Russia is an interesting case: it has already liberated itself from the post-Soviet “shock therapy” neocolonizers. This occurred during Putin’s administration, which is why he is especially hated by the US. So now the support for Russia is in the context of keeping the colonizers from recolonizing it, and supporting Russia to the extent that it helps other states liberate themselves. But Russia isn’t trying to “liberate” Ukraine, at least not all of Ukraine. It’s trying to resolve the genocidal attacks on the people of the Donbas, and it’s trying to resolve the imperialist military expansion at its border.

• Robert Parry, 2015: The Mess that Nuland Made
• Jeffery Sachs, 2023: The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace

Also, Ukraine really does have a fascism problem and has for a long time, and the coup government has materially supported it.

• BBC, 2014: Ukraine underplays role of far right in conflict
• Human Rights Watch, 2014: Ukraine: Unguided Rockets Killing Civilians
• The Hill, 2017: The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda
• The Guardian, 2017: ‘I want to bring up a warrior’: Ukraine’s far-right children’s camp – video
• WaPo, 2018: The war in Ukraine is more devastating than you know
• Reuters, 2018: Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem
• The Nation, 2019: Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine
• openDemocracy, 2019: Why Ukraine’s new language law will have long-term consequences
• Jacobin, 2022: A US-Backed, Far Right–Led Revolution in Ukraine Helped Bring Us to the Brink of War
• Consortium News, 2022: Evidence of US-Backed Coup in Kiev
• Al Jazeera, 2022: Why did Ukraine suspend 11 ‘pro-Russia’ parties?
• History of Fascism in Ukraine: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV

Thats certaintly a good point, I do agree this conflict ending the way it has had a consequence of reinteresting the fascists in europe with NATO and their local military industries.

If you go to page 5 it certainly paints that picture, I was initially going to argue that because of trump pushing for the usa to exit nato around his capaign season, they began funding their local military industries more, but they have been putting more money into NATO percentage wise since 2021, at an exponential rate. Perhaps the consern for the USA voting in trump forced the western world to fearfully put more money in to NATO, as an effort to persuade trump that it is worth the usa’s interest to remain in the organisation, but i am not sure, what do you think?

Yeah man the fringe officer of a dysfunctional intelligence apparatus largely degenerated like the rest of the worker’s state destroyed and looted the Soviet Union. Wasn’t the West, wasn’t American finance capital, wasn’t any of that. T’was Putin. Evil genius.

Fucks sake man.

Unfortunately i think this is true. As much as we all like to say that Russia should have gone all the way in 2014 i think the material basis just wasn’t there yet. Russia has come a very long way since 2014, economically but also militarily, and this should be acknowledged. Arguably they were not even fully ready in 2022, but they literally could not wait any longer, even a few more weeks might have been too late and the Donbass could have been overrun by Nazis and there would have been large scale massacres and an exodus of millions of civilians fleeing to Russia. Russia waited until the very last possible moment. They had to sort out their military issues on the fly, and it’s actually quite impressive what they managed to achieve while fighting all of NATO in a proxy war.

The people in donbass have not been ethnically cleansed, that is a big benefit.

The “consensus on the [western] left” was the way it was because the western left (myself included) was largely ignorant of the real conditions on the ground in Ukraine and the Donbass. We were wrong because we didn’t understand the situation, especially if we didn’t follow Russian language media (even there it was downplayed, for political reasons) and relied on what was available in the Western information sphere which completely either misrepresented or blacked out any real information about the region. The reality is that Ukraine prior to the SMO had already amassed the largest army in Europe after Russia, and was preparing to launch an all out assault on the Donbass republics.

If they had managed to gain a foothold in the urban areas, which is a very realistic possibility given the blitzkrieg tactics that NATO trained them in, it would have been a catastrophe. What we have seen so far in the SMO has vindicated Russia’s decision to launch it when it did ten times over. If the Nazis had been allowed to entrench themselves in the cities of Donetsk and Lugansk Russia would have had to level them entirely to dislodge the Ukrainian forces. Tens of thousands of civilians branded “terrorists” or “collaborators” by the Kiev regime’s Nazi thugs would have been tortured and murdered. Millions would have fled, the remainder would have been used as human shields. Thanks to the SMO today Donetsk and Lugansk do not look like Bakhmut, they are not depopulated ruins, they are thriving cities.

You speak of all of the consequences of the SMO on western policy as if that was not always the plan, as if this conflict was not engineered and provoked by them precisely because they wanted to have this pretext. They left Russia no other choice and they knew it. They put Russia in a Zugzwang where they were forced to make a choice and neither choice was good. This is what nobody who says the SMO was a mistake has ever been able to answer: what choice did Russia have? What were they supposed to do instead?

They literally tried every other avenue, not just since 2014 but since NATO expansion started, they tried explaining their concerns to the West about NATO expansion time and time again, they repeatedly warned, they tried negotiating - doesn’t work when the other side doesn’t negotiate in good faith and only sees agreements as a ruse to buy time to rearm (as has been admitted by multiple European leaders), when the other side doesn’t abide by the agreements - they even tried putting an entire draft treaty proposal in front of the Americans to avoid having to launch the SMO. Nothing worked, Ukraine was getting more and more Nazified, more and more militarized, pumped more and more full of weapons by the West. All this before the SMO, mind you.

It would have been a massive mistake not to launch the SMO. If the Donbass had been overrun and fallen to the Nazis the Russian government would have had a political crisis on their hands that might have brought down the entire government. Leaving the Ukraine situation to fester was creating an existential security risk for Russia that would have destroyed the Russian state. Instead now Russia is in a better economic and military position than it has been since 1991. NATO is panicking and increasing their budgets because they have been humiliated in the Ukraine proxy war. They really believed they could engineer a regime change or even collapse of the Russian state using this conflict, and instead it is NATO that is now close to collapse.

NATO may have (formally) expanded but in material terms it is weaker than ever, its stocks of weaponry and ammunition so depleted it will take a decade or more to refill them. If that’s even possible given how this conflict has exposed the systemic inability of the privatized for-profit arms industry to keep up with the demands of a real peer conflict. And it is by no means as united as it pretends to be, we constantly see signs of their dysfunction and inability to agree on any substantive action. Throwing more money down the bottomless pit of the private MIC won’t change this. It will only further destabilize the social and economic conditions here in Europe as our social safety nets get gutted, taxes increase, inflation continues to rise. Sooner or later this will cause massive political crises in Europe.

Meanwhile Russia’s military industry is reinvigorated, their army expanded, reformed and massively more experienced. Their economy is thriving not despite but largely because of the sanctions and how it has forced the Russian state and economy to adjust, reorient, re-industrialize, and to clamp down on much of the neoliberal rot left over from the 90s. And diplomatically they are more popular across the global south than they have been since the days of the Soviet Union.

Was everything done perfectly? No of course not, far from it. I even think that much of this was not foreseen or planned by the Russian government, they very much were forced to improvise on the fly. Being consummate liberals, they were surprised at how hostile and how hellbent on Russia’s destruction the West turned out to be (despite the fact that many in Russia, especially the communists, were trying to warn the government about this). They were very naive up to and even some time into the SMO. And even they did not expect their economy to hold up as well as it did.

sThe countries who joined were to do so anyway should anything happen.

Sweden was always a de facto NATO country, during the cold war the US air force assets in germany should relocate to sweden in case of nuclear exchange and continue fighting from there. Not exactly something a neutral country would agree with, which Sweden pretended to be at that time.

And Finland moved towards NATO after the end of the USSR, the socdems there paved the way and the right wingers afterwards nailed it in, not remotely unexpected.

Likewise switzerland throwing out its neutrality, they were US lapdogs for a while already. With US state visits to switzerland getting away with outright disrespecting the local government. Once a country sinks that deep, it will come when its master calls.

Any other NATO expansion? Nah.

How great NATO is doing is obvious by not one, but two batshit increases of defense spending, first 2% and now 5%! While all NATOcountries have decrepid infrastructure, underfunded education and recessive economies.