Hello everybody, welcome back to RevLeft Radio.

I decided that since I'm here I might as well jump on the mic and make a few points about Russia now.

What I'm going to say here is not going to be exhaustive. This is a developing situation.

Over on Gorilla History we did a deep thousand year summary of the history between Ukraine and Russia and their relationship

and over on Red Menace. At the end of this week we're going to do a more theoretically informed discussion of Russia discussed the discrepancies between some Marxist-Leninist and Marxist-Leninist Maoist takes on the conflict.

Discuss the question of imperialism and whether or not Russia meets that, you know, Leninist standard of what imperialism actually is, etc.

So for the theoretical breakdown, go over to Red Menace here in a little bit for the deep history, go check out Gorilla History, but just for some basic points I want to make them right here.

So the first thing I'll say is that we have to understand, I think most people on the left and the anti-imperialist left in particular do understand this, which is that this entire conflict could have been avoided by NATO refusing to expand eastward,

by the US refusing to meddle in Ukrainian politics, the funding and arming of Nazi factions to target and attack ethnic Russians in the south and the east, the US attempted coup, the attempt to bring Ukraine closer into the orbit of the west and away from Russia.

All of these things have created the context in which Russia rightly or wrongly, and Putin in particular, feels very much backed in a corner.

Now that is not to justify Russia's actions here because this is an escalatory move on their part, but it does, so this is not to, the NATO talk is not to justify what Russia is doing, but it is to understand the position that Russia is in.

If America was in anything close to a similar position, America would act the exact same way, and we cannot forget just a few short years ago. America was invading bombing, destroying, ripping apart Iraq and Afghanistan, and then it wants to turn around and act like it has the moral high ground and wave its finger at Russia.

First thing is first, and we have to address massive suffering going on amongst regular working people. It seems that the majority of working people in Russia do not want war, and certainly the sanctions implied by Russia's aggression hurt the Russian people more than anybody.

We have already seen Russian people unable to use their credit cards, unable to get money out of ATMs, etc. That is, I believe sanctions are an immoral act of aggression against the innocent civilians of a country, and this idea that they are targeted only towards the elite is absolute bullshit, sanctions ravage entire economies.

Those sanctionings are used by the U.S. and its allies historically to destabilize societies that they don't agree with that won't open up their markets for corporate financial investment that won't tow the American imperialist line when it comes to geopolitics.

The sanctions are used in that context too, as Henry Kissinger once said, make the economy scream such that you could rile up disgust and distaste among the people for a government that the U.S. doesn't like, and then that makes that society much more vulnerable to infiltration, funding and arming certain separatist factions, rebel factions, whatever.

Maybe we've seen this play out a million times, so these sanctions that are being leveraged against Russia are devastating. So you see the Russian working class against war and being burdened by the sanctions that come with Russian aggression, the Ukrainian working class, whatever their political alignment, just don't want to be bombed and murdered and slaughtered.

So they're against war. The U.S. we should be as Americans against our country going into war by any means necessary. We have to prevent the escalation on the part of our country in so far as that's even possible.

And I think that's the real position of anybody within a country engaged in this conflict right now is to try to prevent your government from getting increasingly evolved from escalating the situation, etc.

I do want to touch on the idea of Nazis as well because it's important to note that, you know, especially since 2014, the U.S. has been funding and arming Nazi factions within Ukraine, as I said, that have been carrying out for the last eight to nine years attacks in Donbass in particular, but also within southern and eastern Ukraine more broadly.

Brutal murders of like dozens of Russian ethnic, Russian ethnics outside of Odessa by this faction, for example, and it's important to know that and to see the role that they play.

But I do see some people, particularly on the ML side of things, not everybody, but some of them overemphasizing this and saying this is a Nazi government, which of course Putin is saying for his own strategic and rhetorical reasons.

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