You are completely misunderstanding the context and the reality of the Ukraine conflict. As you yourself have pointed out in another comment here, Palestine’s struggle is just because it is anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist. The same applies to Russia in the context of the Ukraine conflict.

It’s undeniable Russia escalated the conflict 3 years ago and it wasn’t necessary. Russia absolutely had enough power in Ukraine to meddle and pull strings, hell do some assassinations, sanctions, etc.

This is simply not true. Russia had no such power in Ukraine to fundamentally change the trajectory. You are massively overestimating the ability of Russia to exert that kind of influence. Assassinations would have achieved nothing, in fact they would likely have strengthened the imperialist grip on Ukraine. Moreover, the escalation did not come from Russia, it came from NATO via its Ukrainian proxy army.

By 2022 the Donbass Republics and the ethnic Russian people living there were facing an existential threat. Ukraine had been building up an enormous army with the help of NATO since 2015. Starting in late 2021 they had been amassing forces and preparing to launch an all out assault on the Donbass which would have been a bloodbath for the civilians there. Anyone perceived as having collaborated with the rebels would either have had to flee or would be tortured and brutally murdered in retribution for the years of rebellion. It is clear that this attack was coming as preparatory shelling from the Ukrainian side had already begun just a few weeks prior to Russia launching the SMO. I have explained this in a prior comment on another post where i also provided sources confirming that this occurred in the lead up to the SMO: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7112898/6016809

The Donbass militia was not going to be able to withstand an all out attack by a Ukrainian army that had been reconstituted, massively expanded and armed to the teeth by NATO. It is enough to look at how the Ukrainians treated the civilians in the Kursk region, where now countless massacres and atrocities are being uncovered to see what would have happened had Russia not intervened. It was imperative that Russia not allow that attack to begin in earnest, as once the Ukrainian forces had lodged themselves into the urban areas of Donetsk and Lugansk - which they would have done quickly had they broken the militia lines as the frontline was extremely close to the city and the Ukrainians were trained in NATO’s blitzkrieg style of war - they would have been impossible to dislodge without the widespread destruction of the cities, as we have seen throughout this conflict.

We saw in Mariupol what happens when Ukrainian units take over a majority Russian city in Ukraine, how they treat civilians, use them as human shields, and how they entrench themselves into every civilian building. Except it would have been worse even than Mariupol, which was surrounded and cut off from supply and reinforcements and thus could be partly preserved intact despite the best efforts of the Azov and other Ukrainian units to ensure maximum destruction of the city. If Russia had reacted only after the invasion by the Ukrainian forces began they could not have surrounded and cut off the incursion into Donetsk as the Donbass was too heavily fortified by Ukraine. We have seen how long it took Russia to break through those defenses.

Liberating Donetsk would have been a grinding affair more akin to Bakhmut in which the entire city would have been ruined and with Donetsk being an order of magnitude larger almost a million civilians would have been killed or displaced. And Russia would still have been portrayed as the aggressor and be blamed for starting a war and for all the destruction.

The goal of the Banderite Nazis was and is ethnic cleansing. They have explicitly said this. See the sources on this that i gave here: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7263447/6081888 The Ukrainian nationalist project is fundamentally a colonialist one in Eastern Ukraine and the struggle against it is anti-colonialist. And on a broader scale Russia’s SMO is an anti-imperialist and anti-fascist operation, pushing back the expansion of the imperialist NATO by defeating its Ukrainian proxy army and the fascist Kiev regime. Russia’s defeat in this conflict would not accelerate the socialist revolution in Russia any more than the victory of NATO’s jihadi proxies in Syria has done for Syria. Syria and the entire region is now further away from socialism than it has ever been, and imperialism and colonialism have been greatly strengthened there.

I think none of us here disagree with Lenin’s stated position in this text. But you are committing a dogmatic, ultra-left error by reading it as if its application is universal regardless of objective material context. The geopolitical context surrounding the Ukraine conflict and the Western imperialist assault on today’s Russia more broadly is simply not the same as the context in which this text was written. The current context is closer to the one you yourself quoted in your comment about the Palestinian struggle. It is closer to the struggle of the Emir of Afghanistan which Stalin spoke about. A reactionary and capitalist regime but one which in the present context is serving an anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist function.

I completely disagree with the US achieving its goals statement when this war has strengthened the anti-imperialist alliance to a point that the ruling faction of the US is abandoning Ukraine and Europe in an effort to woo Russia against China. We are witnessing the imperialist bloc at it’s weakest point, a direct result from this war.

I’m saying when a reactionary capitalist power invades another reactionary capitalist power I want both those powers to come out of it as weak as can be. I am saying a world with 2 reactionary world powers at each others throats is more conducive to proletarian revolutions than a world with a single world spanning reactionary capitalist power. Wanting my enemies to fight each other is not campism.

Ukraine was building up a sizeable force to reinvade the donbas. Should russia have just sat by while a genocide unfolded on their doorstep?

The violence and suffering in would have happened somewhere. The usa doesn’t take breaks from murder. It doesn’t like its weapons going past their due date. If they didn’t push for war in ukraine they’d be doing murder in africa or south america. Maybe they’d have started shit in China. Then they would have invaded Russia after the pogroms in ukraine were over.

I’m not cheering on the suffering in Ukraine but I am happy that the usa isn’t doing another Iraq which killed 4x the civilians that Russia’s SMO did in a country half the population. I’m happy that They gave the guns to incompetent ukrainians who couldn’t use them to the same devastating effect that usa would have.

The usa did not achieve its aims. It said from the start its goal was to weaken Russia for cheap. This did the opposite. Europe was going to fascism anyways. Don’t blame Russia for what the euros are doing. Spending more on weapons doesn’t make more weapons it just makes weapons more expensive.

Go read it again. Revolutionary defeatism isn’t the idea that communists should want Russia to lose every war. Its wanting your capitalist government to lose the war so you can turn it into a civil war. Do you not understand the context this was written in? If Lenin and Trotsky were Germans Lenin would be advocating that Germany lose the war.

My country is supplying arms and funds to ukraine thus I should want ukraine to to lose because it degrades my governments military and erodes trust in my government. That is what Lenin is saying.

If you are Russian then yes you should want Russia to lose in Ukraine but you better be planning a fucking civil war if they do.

Over a million people dead, over 10 millions displaced, Ukraine is destroyed, the debt will surpass the GDP this year, state assets sold off to foreign capital for chicken feed

You are right about the devastating impact of this proxy war on Ukraine. Sadly this is what happens when the West manages to turn you into a proxy. They will use you and destroy you. But to blame this devastation on Russia is to completely ignore reality, the fact that the war was started not by Russia but by the US and the Europeans when they orchestrated the Maidan coup. Russia tried for eight years to resolve this diplomatically. Even when the SMO had started, Russia still offered a way out with the Istanbul negotiations. All of the destruction that came afterwards is solely on the US and its European puppets who went and told the Ukrainian side to renege on the peace agreement they were about to sign and promised them a blank check for military and financial support. Moreover the selling off of Ukraine and the destruction of its public sector had already begun long before the SMO. That was always going to happen after the West successfully engineered a color revolution.

But the opposite is happening, US has achieved its goals in this war. This war has accelerated the European descent into fascism, it made Europe dependent on the US energy, it triggered European countries to join NATO and to raise their defense budgets by billions.

You are wrong in saying that the US has achieved all its goals in this war. It has achieved some goals as you correctly stated with the impact this has had on Europe. But if you think that they didn’t go into this originally hoping, intending and to a large extent even believing that they would defeat Russia, militarily or via sanctions and overthrow the Russian government, you have not paid attention to just how much they invested in this. And they certainly didn’t and don’t plan on losing Ukraine, which they very well may if the entire post-Maidan Kiev regime ends up collapsing as a result of the Russian victory. Blackrock and other Western corporations have not invested so much into owning Ukraine only to lose it to the Russians.

If Ukraine is lost to them then everything that happens in Europe is nothing more than a consolation prize. They have achieved a short term victory in subjugating Europe but in doing so they have severely destabilized it and further undermined their own global hegemony. Russia’s victory is a victory for anti-imperialism. It is doubtful whether the increase of the European defense budgets is sustainable or even feasible at the levels proposed. Especially with the deindustrialization that is occurring. And it comes at the cost of the gutting of European welfare states which does not in the long run stabilize the imperialist position but rather has the opposite effect. Is is also not clear how long NATO as an entity will still survive after this defeat and the splits that are emerging in the imperialist camp.

The question is whether this text by Lenin suggests that Russian communists should desire the defeat of Russia in this war so that they can turn it into a civil war, a revolution. The answer is yes, unambiguously.

The defeat of Russia would not turn into a revolutionary civil war. If you think that then you have no understanding of the real conditions and political situation in Russia. Russian communists have no ability presently to do what you are fantasizing about here. And i’m sorry to be so blunt but that’s what this is, a fantasy completely detached from the reality on the ground. If a civil war does take place it will be more akin to what happened to Yugoslavia with ethno-religious hatred and separatism breaking out, reactionary nationalist forces taking over and Russia being balkanized into Western neo-colonies and NATO fiefdoms just as the Balkans have been. Is the socialist revolution any closer in any of the countries that NATO has destroyed and plunged into internal conflicts? Is it any closer in Iraq? Libya? Syria?

I need to repeat this because this cannot be stressed enough: the geopolitical conditions of today are not the same as those in Lenin’s time. You cannot blindly take a text which was written in a specific context and under specific historical conditions and apply it over a century later in totally different context without a proper analysis of the real conditions. This is un-scientific and anti-Marxist. There is no inter-imperialist rivalry today (at most there may be emerging splits in the imperialist camp). The working class is disorganized and the communist movement is not in the position it was at the time that the First World War broke out. The US’s unipolar hegemony which suppresses not only socialist revolutionary movements but any kind of sovereignty and de-colonization across the world would only be strengthened by the defeat of Russia.

Gaining access to Russia’s resources would greatly alleviate the problems that Western capitalism is now facing as a result of the mounting contradictions of neoliberalism and of the emerging multi-polar world in which it is much harder to extract neo-colonial plunder from the global south when they are developing and have alternative centers of power to look to. It would be akin to the infusion of life that the global capitalist system, which by the 1970s had begun to run into serious issues, received after the fall of socialism in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the USSR. Such a renewed age of rampant plunder would delay the potential for socialist revolutions not just in the West but the world over by many decades, maybe longer. It would place even the Chinese revolution under an existential threat.

And ultimately neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians would benefit from it. In fact at the moment the best hope the Ukrainians have is a total Russian victory that would liberate them from not only their own fascist regime but from the total enslavement by the IMF, Blackrock & co. that they are looking at today.