![](https://lemmygrad.ml/pictrs/image/0d38ca5a-79e0-4aca-8563-68e87d26a189.jpeg)
![](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c47230a8-134c-4dc9-89e8-75c6ea875d36.png)
Sanctions don’t hurt dictators, only people. This only makes a country’s population like their dictator more than the US.
Sanctions don’t hurt dictators, only people. This only makes a country’s population like their dictator more than the US.
Or at the very least Asian-Americans should start arming themselves. Escaping America is not always an option.
The USA has global hegemony right now, while Russia doesn’t have the economic capacity to be a hegemon. The USA has been bombing and destroying countries for its entire existence and is currently using Ukraine to try to do the same to Russia. It is powerful enough and dangerous enough that nearly any action that opposes US hegemony is a good thing for the rest of the planet. It’s already caused enough damage that it is now fundamentally an existential threat to humanity.
In this lens, who does it make sense to support? Russia, who has repeatedly asked NATO to not expand eastwards after its application to join NATO twice got rejected, or Ukraine, who had a US-backed coup back in 2014 that was unpopular enough that Crimea and the Donbass voted to leave Ukraine? A coup that replaced the democratically elected pro-Russian government with an anti-Russian one who has been shelling the Donbass for almost a decade. The Ukraine border is geographically the hardest for Russia to defend (which is why they aren’t particularly worried about Finland joining NATO), a weakness exploited by Operation Barbarossa. Which side has Azov again?
We support Russia because we support any and all actions that bring an end to the war in the Donbass as soon as possible. We support them because it was Ukraine who violated the Minsk agreements, proving that they can’t be trusted to not push into Russia and extend its shelling of russian-speakers in the Donbass into the entirety of Russia as soon as they somehow won against Russia. More importantly, Russia losing would mean it at best becoming a puppet state to the US and at worse being balkanized. Both outcomes would be objectively bad for China and every country that currently depends on Russia to resist US aggression (Cuba, Iran, Syria, everyone currently being sanctioned etc.).
We don’t support Russia because we think it’s good or is a worker’s paradise. We support it because supporting US-backed Ukraine is objectively the wrong position to take. You can’t ignore a nation’s national security concerns and not expect them to react violently when said concerns are violated.
Ok. What have you done to weaken US hegemony, then? If we don’t need Russia surely there is a much better marxist alternative already militarily weakening the US, right? Because if so I’m happy to drop all support for Putin.
I would absolutely love it if the communist party of russia (putin’s only relevant opposition) managed to pull off a coup, but until that happens we work with what we got.