Ukraine allowed itself to be used as a NATO proxy and the people of Ukraine are now paying the price for that. People of Ukraine allowed the west to overthrow their legitimate government and to install a fascist regime in its place.

The destiny of Ukraine is to serve as a warning for others going forward. It's important to clarify that NATO never had any intent to defend Ukraine. NATO used the people of Ukraine to fight Russia as a proxy.

It's also important to note that Ukraine was already in a civil war before Russia intervened. This lecture that Mearsheimer gave back in 2015 is an excellent primer on the subject. Mearsheimer is certainly not pro Russian in any sense, and a proponent of US global hegemony. First, here’s the demographic breakdown of Ukraine:

here’s how the election in 2004 went:

this is the 2010 election:

As we can clearly see from the voting patterns in both elections, the country is divided exactly across the current line of conflict. Furthermore, a survey conducted in 2015 further shows that there is a sharp division between people of eastern and western Ukraine on which economic bloc they would rather belong to:

The most likely outcome of the war is that Russia is going to absorb Russian majority parts of Ukraine that either actively wish to be part of Russia, or are neutral. Meanwhile, western Ukraine will be left as a problem for Europe to deal with.

NATO defeat that helpes an enemy of the West is the next best thing. Is that correct?

As I noted earlier, it's not simply that Russia is an enemy of the west, but also that it's currently aligned with the global majority and unlike the west it is not hostile towards socialist states. I also think that both military defeat against Russia and economic defeat in the trade war with China will play a significant role in discrediting neoliberalism within the west. This will create opportunities for new ideas to emerge which is essential for any sort of a socialist movement in the west. I wrote about this dynamic here in more detail.

https://dialecticaldispatches.substack.com/p/the-stress-test-liberalism-never

Despite Western claims, Russia is not prosecuting this war in the name of imperialism nor revanchism. You could say that irredentism was a factor, but only insomuch as ethnic Russians inhabit eastern & southern Ukraine and had been suffering persecution by US/Ukraine-backed fascists. The major factor was US/NATO expansion. Previously.

My cousin lives in Russia and he also obviously agrees that current state is not good, from what he told me, CPRF is the biggest opposition(and biggest communist party) there is to Putin, but for some reason they agree with him on some policies. For LGBT, it's completely unfair to criticize him on that considering that his stance is the norm in even most of the communist parties since Stalin, it was the same during USSR, CPRF has the same stance, KKE has same stance and it was the same during Tito in Yugoslavia here, so pretty much Eastern European standard. As for Illyin... yikes.

And he sometimes praises Stalin for some reason(even while shitting on Lenin), although he had some interesting takes recently like that time when he said that nationalism is the first stage to nazism since it's based not only on love for nation but also on hatred for others. So it's really hit or miss with him.