Yes the country with a Jewish president is totally nazi sure nice logic there 🙄 👍 😉 👏

Russia pit Slavic country’s against each other funny how eastern Europe hates Russia just because they have done nothing but bring suffering and death to that region of the world for centuries funny how they want to align with the west and have money and health care and be able to live and not have Russian missiles fall on there head but america bad

Yep cause Russia sure ain’t bombing civilians Ukraine dropping them right on these civilian trenches

It is then also an alliance of Imperial core countries (it was after all, founded in response to the Warsaw Pact).

It was NOT founded in response to the Warsaw pact. NATO was formed in 1949. The Warsaw Pact was founded in 1955. The Warsaw pact was founded in response to NATO. NATO was building up West Germany economically less than 10 years after the fucking holocaust. The Soviet Union tried to join NATO in 1954 and was told “no, you aren’t democratic enough.” But they had no problem letting West Germany in while integrating “former” nazis like Adolf Heusinger into their command structure.

I mean, it is literally a defensive alliance if only because if one country is attacked, the others are legally obliged to treat it as an attack on them

less than a third of NATO countries were admitted to NATO through some kind of democratic referendum. It was almost always the unilateral decision of the given country’s bourgeois class, rather than something the people themselves were consulted on. In the cases where democratic referendums were held, it was often in countries that had just been balkanized (former Yugoslav countries, for example), or countries that were just at the outskirts of NATO and were therefore pressured geopolitically into choosing whose “sphere of influence” they were under: Russian federation, or USA. When a nation is compelled under duress to pick sides like that, and a class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is the one that usually ends up making the decisions, I doubt the alliance can reasonably be called “defensive.” Its borders keep expanding to encircle and balkanize nations whose main “crime” was being socialist Once Upon A Time. NATO expansion is marching us towards WW3. It is an expansionist and aggressive alliance that merely uses Article 5 to appear defensive and Democratic, while trying its hardest to constantly provoke wars and lay claim to natural resources.

Is the following something a “defensive” alliance does?

Do you think only Ukraine violated the agreement? Why is on them to honor it when the rebels weren’t?

People in the political minority in Eastern Ukraine went to Western Ukraine so they’d be in the majority, in the period between the ouster of the Kremlin-prefered leadership in Kyiv and the rebels getting organized. This was in the news back in like 2014, so it’s likely been buried in the more prevalent discussions about the Minsk agreements and the subsequent invasion of the wider country.

With all ceasefires, both sides claim that the other violated it. I have no reason to give the Donbas separatists the benefit of the doubt anymore than I do Ukraine. It’s not like either side is openly communist, Russia isn’t some left wing workers state anymore, it’s not like they’re trying to reverse the economic and political changes of 1991, only the borders.

ah sorry i had no idea i have to spell out exact numbers of combatants, casualties, displaced persons, and length/area of combat zones or it’s “subjective”. don’t be obtuse, this isn’t western spin to say more people are getting hurt in the expanded war than were in the Donbass.

when the separatists you arm & operate your military alongside hit a civilian target with those weapons you do have a measure of culpability. just like NATO has responsibility for the weapons they’ve given ukriane.

to understand that you must do a growth

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.

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.

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.

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.