The invasion of Ukraine has little to do with "dictating terms" or creating a sphere of influence, they're protecting their own country from imperial USA which has spent most of the last decade militarizing Ukraine after engineering a coup there to make the government rabidly anti-russia. I'm sorry but it's bananas to compare the Ukraine situation to the US/Latin America relationship and its equally ridiculous to call actions which are clearly anti-imperialist in their effects just the same as imperialism because of whatever you imagine the motivation for those actions to be. This is how we get things like claims of Cuban imperialism.

Caring about intent is idealism, caring about outcomes is materialism. You don’t have to like Putin to realize we have to work with him (we, as in the global left and AES) and that he has been a reliable ally

Literally no one here is arguing that Ukraine is good, but the actual leftists (as opposed to national chauvinists) here are arguing that this is unmistakably an inter-imperialist war and not some convoluted "the invasion of Ukraine is anti-imperialist because Russia is on the imperial periphery of a super-imperialist bloc" bullshit argument.

I'm someone who can absolutely advance arguments that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was caused by outside imperialist circumstances. But now that it has happened, and is actual fact? There is zero "critical support" of Russian aggression here. The only legitimate communist position in this scenario is for Ukrainian and Russian soldiers alike to turn their guns on their own generals. Will that happen? No. But that's the fucking position the Bolsheviks themselves took from the start, not some ridiculous stance about how actually the Kaiser was right to resist all along and criticizing the German war effort is bad.

Undermining American hegemony by...destabilizing a region that America benefits from being unstable? Not really the same situation. Russia is actually doing real harm to our ability to maintain a global stranglehold. That is a good thing, even if Putin is otherwise a shitty reactionary capitalist.

ISIS is American-backed imperialist force, and Russia crushed it

Another point in our favor, not yours