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this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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Seems to be KPRF, the revisionist parliamentary party that supports the war
The KPRF was the only party that never stopped supporting and materially aid the people and the militias of Donbass over the years. Reminder that Putin wanted to return Donbass to Ukraine to make amends with Europe, and is now only being forced to take the matter into his own hands because he was denied from joining the fascist club of Europe.
speaking a bit soon, aren't we? Also we'll never get to see what the alternative was.
USSR asked to join NATO in 1954. They were told "no." Then NATO let west germany in and appointed a bunch of "former" nazis to key positions. Russia tried to join NATO in 2002. Were told "no." Russia supported America in its reactionary "war on terror." and that still didn't tighten Russia's relationship with "the west." turns out the only thing that can make Russia have a better relationship with the west is balkanizing themselves, breaking up into dozens of tiny republics, and privatizing everything, because the west's vision for Yugoslavia is the same vision it has for Russia. Turns out there is nothing Russia can do to have a better relationship with the west. Because the west isn't mutually interested in a better relationship. The west is interested in balkanizing and privatizing former soviet nations. To punish them for having the audacity for being socialist once upon a time. To make sure it never happens again. To turn them into neocolonies. Ukraine has tried to have a better relationship with the west. What did it get them? It got them to sacrifice themselves by the thousands in a western proxy war in exchange for not even a NATO membership. Ukraine is getting balkanized and privatized on NATO's behalf.
Oh, and the sanctions? They aren't working. Russia is still selling gas to Europe, just through third parties. The entire situation is a reactionary shitshow, and the chief responsibility lies with the imperial core for deliberately instigating the conflict for years and years and years. Russia's options were to allow itself to get slowly encircled, or to ruin its "reputation" with a bunch of reactionary capitalist nations. It chose the latter.
Russia is reactionary and capitalist too? No shit! How did that happen? The west was gleeful when the Russian federation came into existence.
8 years of waiting for Ukraine to start implementing Minsk agreement just to see NATO arming them instead.
The fact is that both Merkel and Hollande (guarantors of Minsk II) have publicly admitted that Minsk was merely to buy time for Ukraine to militarize itself, and was not a serious attempt to pursue peace between both countries. Ukraine was going to invade Donbass and Crimea sooner or later, Russia only realized this after stupidly waiting for 8 years.
Like it or not, United Russia is a capitalist party that wanted to increase business ties with Europe and make money. Do you seriously think that Putin invaded Ukraine not knowing they would get sanctioned by the entire Western world and losing hundreds of billions of their oligarchs’ money? The Minsk agreement was their compromise - to return Donbass to Ukraine in an attempt to make amends with Europe. The communists are the ones who continued their support and aid to the Donbass militias all these years.
I've heard people say that United Russia is made up of two main components - the Oligarchs and the Siloviki (the security and intelligence complex). Occasionally they struggle for power internally but since Putin is strongly of the silovik background, the oligarchs have been subordinated to the siloviki for a long time.
I don't understand the complexities of Russian politics enough to have a firm view, but it's possible that the Oligarchs losing a bunch of money (and therefore power) actually benefitted the Siloviki faction inside United Russia. That goes hand in hand with the idea that by sanctioning the Oligarchs, the West actually threw away their best chance at overthrowing Putin internally via some sort of Oligarch-backed coup.
Edit: preemptive apologies to Russian speakers for probably butchering the grammatical forms.
Nitpick but I see this claim a lot but I don't buy it. Mostly because I don't believe Germany would plan so heavily around Russian gas if it knew the war was inevitable. I'm inclined to think they're impling it to look like they knew what they were doing and cover their own asses for negotiating a failed agreement, while appealing to an audience that is (for the most part) uncritically supportive of Ukraine. I also think its a pretty big stretch to characterize their words as "publically admitting it was not a serious agreement." What Merkel said was,
What she's saying is that regardless of whether or not it was possible to achieve peace through the negotiations, they were still beneficial to Ukraine in buying time. That's not the same thing as saying they were done in bad faith.
I think the Russian charactization of this quote is trying to paint a picture of Western governments as highly co-ordinated, when the reality is more complex. Germany isn't holding Ukraine's leash, the US had to blow uo Nord Stream because the Germans weren't willing to co-operate, etc. There's bumbling, competing interests at play.
Yes I understand what you’re saying, but it needs to be reminded that the post-2009 German economic recovery was highly dependent on cheap Russian gas import. There is simply no alternative, Germany struck gold with Russia selling them cheap gas with euro as the currency of transaction. It was cheap energy that allowed Germany to preserve its high labor wages. That, or expensive energy with depressed wages (like many Asian countries do). No other way around that.
What I think actually happened though (and there are many circumstantial evidence to suggest this), was that Germany was absolutely convinced that the combined sanctions of the world’s largest economies (US + EU) would absolutely demolish Russia’s economy within months, if not weeks, which they often deride as one that is smaller than Italy’s GDP. In their chauvinistic mind, there is no way that a weak economy like Russia’s could ever survive such powerful sanction forces of theirs. With the collapse of the Russian economy, they’d be able to actually carve up Russia’s resources for themselves. In other words, they got greedy.
The EU responses after the war started support this hypothesis. Instead of advocating for ceasefire, the EU continued to pile up more and more sanctions against Russia, somehow hoping that just one more sanction would actually bring Russia to its knee. And they kept waiting and waiting and didn’t see what they expected to happen.
It also wasn’t helped by the fact that Western propaganda churned out in support of Ukraine had distorted their frame of reference, often painting a picture of Russia on the brink of collapse, and it would not surprise anyone that their politicians and bureaucrats actually bought into that. Then, you also have someone like George Soros making headlines saying “Russia would not be able to stop exporting their gas because otherwise their wells will freeze, so Europe just need to hold out a little longer and wait for the Russians to come begging again.” Many European industrialists didn’t even see the perils of their own sanctions until it was too late.
I've had this conversation before but I find it extremely implausible that the West planned all of this out in advance and the lynchpin of the entire plot was being able to destroy Russia with sanctions alone. Again, Germany wasn't even willing to fully participate, and they had to resort to some pretty desperate measures after the pipeline was destroyed. Nothing was done to ensure India's cooperation, and they were saber-rattling with China, neither of which makes sense if they were planning on all this.
I also haven't heard any real explanation for what caused this miscalculation, other than pure stupidity and buying into their own propaganda. I think this is the same flawed analysis behind the initial point that I disputed. When a politician says something you can't just take it at face value, even when it fits into your narrative and makes them look bad, you still have to consider why they're saying it, what they're trying to accomplish, and who they're trying to appeal to. When they started doing sanctions, obviously they would say they thought they would work, but this indicates nothing about their actual beliefs. They were just trying to drum up support for the sanctions, there's no reason why they'd say, "Well, who knows if these will work or not" if they're trying to get people to support them. Very rarely do politicians say something just because they think it's true.
The narrative that fits actual events better without requiring abject stupidity and actions contrary to the actors' own interests, is that Germany did not expect a full scale war and did not plan for losing Nord Stream 2. The outbreak of war came as a surprise to a lot of people, including the majority of this site, and Merkel did not have a crystal ball. The ceasefire was broken due to domestic pressure from the far-right, plus international pressure from the US, which did not assume sanctions would work, but rather saw extended bloodshed as a possibility and did not care, due to the profits it would mean for the military-industrial complex and not caring at all about the lives of Ukrainians. There are internal fractures within NATO and within NATO states, due to competing class interests, it's not one big conspiracy working together.
Why do you think it would need to be a conspiracy? The Europeans simply didn’t see Russia as a potent threat and felt entitled to not giving Russia the respect it deserves. This attitude was all too common during the lead up to Ukraine signing the EU Association Agreement which then led to the Maidan coup. The crass European behavior can be seen as them not taking Russia seriously.
For Europe, Russia is simply a gas station with an economy smaller than Italy. If Italy is barely surviving in the EU, you don’t even have to think about what would happen to Russia when both US and EU combine their economic forces whose GDP is many fold higher than Russia’s.
In other words, they perceive Russia as a nuisance that can be easily crushed when worst comes to worst i.e. a war broke out. No need to anticipate for what will happen in a war when you already see yourself as an economic powerhouse against a tiny struggling economy and has the power to turn it into a pariah state in a matter of weeks, which would then end the war.
Both sides pro-imperialist nonsense akin to "Both sides never seriously intended to follow the Iran deal" to defend ripping it up
Russia was following Minsk 2 much, much closer than Ukraine was, who had tens of thousands of cease fire violations. Its not a “both sides didn’t follow it” situation. It’s a “one side was acting in bad faith to buy time to militarize and always fully intended to attack eventually vs. the other side just didn’t want to have to deal with the whole situation and wanted it to chill out”
No they didnt. The obama regime was already thretening european companies that planned to invest in iran after the deal was suposedly in effect and before trump won.
This always seems like a poorly based position to me. All Russia wants would've been guaranteed by successful implementation of the agreement. What part of the Minsk agreements did Russia not adhere to?
Minsk what? Ok no evidenc-Minsk 2 what?
Ya'll could have a Minsk 3 and then 4 years of ukraine bombing people they supposedly want to reintegrate into their country and still find it hard to fault the ukranian state
KPRF has potential and extremely radical areas, but the main heads of it are old soviet bureaucrats
DPRK supports Russia in this war because it's not an imperialist one
I wonder what kind of parallels can be drawn with Ukraine now and China during WW2 (when the communists allied with the nationalists in order to fend off the Japanese). Perhaps strategically it makes sense for Russian communists to "support" Russia in order to stave off NATO. This would give more breathing room for leftist agitation inside of Russia (and eastern Ukraine for that matter, perhaps western Ukraine too I hope).
Definitely more breathing room
Much easier for the communists to defeat the Russian state than all of NATO
NATO kill count: Tens of Millions
Russia kill count: Tens of Thousands
Some libs in here really require perspective
It's probably in the millions at least because of shock therapy
The shock therapy was done by the west to Russia. Are you saying that Russia should receive millions? That’s like blaming the massacre of Indonesian communists on the communists
uh... i mean the massacre of indonesian communists wasnt done by the american military, it was done by the indonesians as a proxy of the west. the russian government started as a proxy of the west for shock therapy. they participated.
Comprador traitors indeed, but not the current Russian state or people. This is extreme levels of victim blaming of the Russian people and using their own deaths and suffering against them
???
it was the government doing it. not the russian people. im literally czech the same shit happened to us you dolt
These exact parallels have been discussed here quite a bit. The class breakdown of China in WW2 was that the communists (representing the landless peasants and proletariat) built a temporary alliance with the national bourgeois (the local owners) in order to fight outside colonizers, invaders and the international bourgeois (global imperialist capital hegemony).
Russia, Iran, Syria, Belarus, Brazil and others are currently representing the national bourgeois in this alliance with the proletariat states of China, Cuba, DPRK, Venezuela, Vietnam, etc. They are temporarily allied to defeat the greater enemy, the international bourgeois of imperialist capital (NATO, America, UK, EU, Israel, Anglo-nations).
I get the impression the DPRK's support boils down to the fact that, if the US is bogged down supporting Ukraine, that's less resources going to harass the North.
Their support of Russia has zero impact on the status of the war as imperialist or not.
They have stated their position very clearly, you don't need to go off "impressions". They understand how anti-imperialism works. DPRK has never once in its history supported an imperialist war and have been on the correct side on basically every single conflict. They have a 100% track record in my view.
For sure, I just didn't want to type out a whole argument spelling out Lenin's definition of imperialism and analyzing Russia's economy and foreign policy
It's an anti-imperial war from Russia's perspective, they are fighting NATO encroachment and resisting imperialism as they did in Syria
Most of their youth wing literally split over supporting the war. when at best the only people worth supporting even critically was the LPR and DPR (and Putin couped their nascent proto-Socialist governments almost as soon as they formed.)
I mean it's right there ffs "Revolutionary Defeatism"
Revolutionary defeatism is when I root for NATO to finish what they started in their quest to destroy Russia so they can then move on to China
no one here doesn't agree that NATO should stop arming ukraine and withdraw, the rhetorical sheen of 'critical support' or 'defeatism' doesn't change the priorities of western leftists, but it gives everyone around here endless excuses to lecture each other about the way they talk about it being more "marxist" and "materialist". it doesn't matter what we call it, all that matters is pressuring natio governments to stop perpetuating the war
Hey at least they helped that Communist guy in Ukraine that lost his eye and had a red star etched into his back by the Nazis there
You think this Russian communist party is supporting America here? Much confusion.