No, no communist thinks the RF is the Soviet Union (or RSFSR, which was the specifically Russian part of the USSR). What communists understand is that the Russian Federation is currently strategically aligned against imperialism, and is a strong ally of socialist countries, due to inherited political ties and capitalist encirclement. Communists support a revolution in Russia to overthrow the nationalists and reinstate socialism, but not on western terms.

It looks like we need to unpack what the phrase critical support actually means. Communists don’t look at the Russian Federation and imagine the Soviet Union, nor does nobody think Putin is building socialism. The support is a strategic judgment about the global balance of forces, rooted in a materialist reading of where the primary contradiction lies rather than having anything to do with Russia’s internal character.

The primary contradiction in the world is a bloc conflict between Western imperialist states, led by the United States, and the Global South. Western imperialism is the system that enforces economic extraction through debt, sanctions, military bases, trade rules, enabled by dollar’s reserve status. It’s the force that has strangled development in the Global South and consistently prevented any alternative path of development from gaining traction. As long as that system remains unchallenged there can be no space for experiments in socialism or even genuinely sovereign capitalist development that could later be transformed. That makes breaking Western hegemony a prerequisite for any meaningful change going forward.

Russia currently acts as the main military force directly challenging American led unipolar order. While it’s not doing it for communist reasons, their push against NATO expansion and efforts to build alternative financial and trade architectures with BRICS are objectively opening fractures in Western dominance. Russia bogs down NATO in Ukraine and exposes the limits of Western power which, in turn, weakens the imperialist camp creating room for left movements to grow around the world.

So when communists say they critically support Russia, we are not endorsing Russia’s internal political system, its capitalist class, nationalist ideology, or its treatment of workers and leftists inside its borders. Our support is conditional and tactical, extending only as far as Russia acts as a counter hegemonic force. The moment Russia pivots toward trying to carve up the world with Western powers or becomes a new oppressor of weaker nations in a way that simply replaces current imperialist hierarchy, that support goes away. Communists are internationalists who see the current moment as one where the central task as weakening the main enemy.

I’ll use a historical parallel to help make this all more concrete. Communists critically supported the Allied powers against nazi Germany during the second world war even though the Allies were capitalist imperialists themselves, and just as is the case with Russia today, no one mistook Churchill or Roosevelt for being socialists. The point was that fascism represented the most aggressive and immediate threat to the working class and to the possibility of socialist advance. Today, that threat happens to be Western imperialism with its endless hot wars along with economic warfare against the rest of the world. And the scope of critical support is about actively disrupting Western imperialism.

We live in a world where the US and its vassals can dictate terms to everyone else, and breaking Western hegemony leads to one with more possibilities for mass movements and resource sovereignty creating more room for socialist organizing. Russia’s resistance helps crack that door open, and that’s why it makes sense to make tactical alignment on one particular axis of struggle while maintaining full independence on all others which is what giving critical support is.

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Lemmy.ml is broadly federated, so anything that suggests Ukraine may not be winning the war is down voted by people from Lemmy.world, etc.

i recognize that the US is rapidly enshittifying people’s economic situation these days

Since it’s inception through it’s long campaign of perpetrating, funding, and backing colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism across the periphery.

I’ve got a story of 500 trucks waiting in line to feed people in a concentration camp but the West blocking them from entering.

Here’s a meme from the front page today

You can explain why you think it’s baffling. I don’t think it’s pointless

How familiar are you with Marxism-Leninism?

The only reason people withold criticising those countries on some issues is because the West will use that as a pretext to genocide them. It’s like discussing “how to improve the Jewish community” during the Holocaust.

Those things can wait until the countries have finally liberated themselves from Western imperialism. Without that they’ll never be able to take any serious steps before being moved back to the start.

Coincidentally that’s also the reason most Westerners are conditioned to constantly talk ill of those countries. They have to liberate Iraq Afghanistan Syria Libya Iran

An excellent article about this pertaining the Middle-East: Arabs and Muslims: The Real Victims of Modern Antisemitism

Yes, some communists do support some of that but not because of ideology but for a strategic reason, the part of “overlooking everything else” is completely bullshit.

Hence why you won’t ever see them talk ill publicly of Iran, North Korea, Russia, China, etc.

Press X to doubt.

You won’t see communists to that much because liberals already do that endlessly for all the wrong reasons.

That “communist” ‘friend’ either never heard of critical support, or vastly misunderstands it.

I generally support Russia. And Ukraine. Because the more resources spent on the pointless war the fewer resources can be spent internally in those countries to resist popular revolution.

It’s not overlooking the bad that either government does, it is simply supporting them and the actions they perform that happen to align with the wider goal of global revolution.

You are confused about what imperialism is. Imperialism is not having border disputes. Ukraine did not exist until the USSR created it, it’s name is literally “borderland” (ukrainia, krai = border). Russia has been involved in a number of military conflicts, all of them at its borders. The US, meanwhile has had 5 times as many military conflicts as Russia has had since 1992 and those conflicts are all not on the US border. They are not border disputes, they are extractive dominance projects.

The RF has stated that the reason it took Crimea and the reason it is taking the Donbas is NATO expansion. You don’t have to believe them, but you do have to look at the history.

Ukraine and NATO had no involvement in Ukraine until late 2013. In late 2013, NATO and Ukraine held their first join military exercise. A few months later, the Yanukovich government fled the country when a group of armed right wingers invaded parliament. That’s a coup, by definition. It was at that moment that Russia chose to take Crimea - not because it was proactively engaged in a imperialist ambitions but because it was reacting to the changing conditions on its border. Crimea specifically was strategically critical for Russian defense because of Sevastapol and the Black Sea. That was pure reactive chess, not imperialism.

The SMO in the Donbas was stated to be for the same reason. NATO movements on the border had become indistinguishable from genuine military threats and Russian national security couldn’t survive that. If we look at the history, we see that from 2014 onward NATO and Ukraine greatly increased their military integration, with Ukraine cedeing more and more sovereignty over to NATO. It was a game of chicken, ultimately, and the US and Ukraine were both monitoring Russian reactions continuously because they were fully aware that what they were doing would eventually provoke Russia. They were very open about the fact that “security” did not include Russia and that any Russian security concerns could be dismissed out of hand. That’s exactly how you create security crises. And that’s what happened.

Imperialism is not when one country responds to nuclear provocations at its border by partially invading another country and holding territory that has significant historical overlap with changing borders. Imperialism is when you use your economic dominance to create vassal states and then use their economic subjugation to create political subjugation and then use that political subjugation to expand your own military at the expense of the vassal’s sovereignty and security. Ukraine is in ruins because of American imperialist ambitions.

I suggest reading “Imperialism the (current, at the time) Highest Stage of Capitalism” by Lenin, it might help give you a better idea of what Imperialism actually is, note: Russia is Capitalist right now, but not Imperialist. The only Imperialist countries in the world right now are all Capitalist ones, and they are all allied against the Global South. Any countries fighting back against this Imperialist Bloc are fighting an Anti-Imperialist fight.

The Imperialist countries in question are the usual gang, US, UK, Canada, Germany, France, Japan, Australia, ETC. basically the countries you are taught are “good countries” are actually bad countries, and the countries you are taught are “bad countries” are actually good countries (give or take, overly simplestic)

Yeppers, “socialist” = fake leftist = hidden imperialist = lib 😁

I edited my comment to elaborate a bit more, probably while you were typing your response.

Regardless, Communism != Russia. That was my point.