The leadership in Kiev is neo-Nazi, it isn’t just a small group. Ukrainian citizens are suffering under the Banderite regime. Russia has neo-Nazis too, but they aren’t infesting the leadership, who are mostly nationalists supported by the majority of people for kicking out foreign imperialists that were plundering the country in the 90s. What radicalized me against western imperialism is living in a dying capitalist empire. I consume plenty of media from the west, there’s no tunnel vision nor blinders on. Being a communist and being anti-US Empire isn’t “insane.”

No, it’s reality that you’re denying. Ukraine is run by neo-Nazis, as was reported by the west, which you still disagree with as “Russian propaganda.” From @[email protected]

• BBC, 2014: Ukraine underplays role of far right in conflict
• Human Rights Watch, 2014: Ukraine: Unguided Rockets Killing Civilians
• The Hill, 2017: The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda
• The Guardian, 2017: ‘I want to bring up a warrior’: Ukraine’s far-right children’s camp – video
• WaPo, 2018: The war in Ukraine is more devastating than you know
• Reuters, 2018: Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem
• The Nation, 2019: Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine
• openDemocracy, 2019: Why Ukraine’s new language law will have long-term consequences
• Jacobin, 2022: A US-Backed, Far Right–Led Revolution in Ukraine Helped Bring Us to the Brink of War
• Consortium News, 2022: Evidence of US-Backed Coup in Kiev
• Al Jazeera, 2022: Why did Ukraine suspend 11 ‘pro-Russia’ parties?
• History of Fascism in Ukraine: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV

Russia isn’t ethnically cleansing people, Kiev is.

Depends mostly on who you are. Capitalists and celebrities are more restricted and censored, but for the working classes that doesn’t apply nearly as much. People in China do genuinely support their government, and this is proven by consistent polling by western orgs showing over 90% support.

Kiev is run by far-right neo-Nazis that uphold Stepan Bandera. The Russian Federation isn’t socialist by any means, but it isn’t run by literal neo-Nazis and it isn’t ethnically cleansing anyone.

Wow, that’s certainly a reaction.

They are taking historically Russian areas like Donetsk and Luhansk. The west is doing what it wants because it’s using Ukraine as a proxy war to damage Russia, and is carving Ukraine out for resources. Yanukovych escaping the far-right Banderites that the west supported doesn’t mean he was a puppet either. You’re deeply confused here.

Yanukovych was not a puppet. The IMF loan came with stipulations requiring austerity, the Russian loan did not. Secondly, Russia is intervening directly in the Donbass region. It isn’t dubious at all that Crimea and the Donbass are heavily Russian, they were added to Ukraine only a century ago.

Marxists tend to critically support Russia over Ukraine here. Russia doesn’t want to “take over Ukraine,” it wants the 4 oblasts and Ukraine to be demillitarized. Donetsk and Luhansk both have been at war with Kiev since 2014 and voted to join the Russian Federation, and the far-right Banderites that siezed power in the 2014 Euromaidan coup have been heavily millitarizing and oppressing ethnic Russians. Ukraine serves a similar geopolitical purpose for the US Empire as Israel, it’s a heavily millitarized anti-communist country surroundrd by geopolitical adversaries.

This is an excellent overview of modern Korean dynamics by tracing Korean history. In addition to destroying 80% of buildings in the north, allegedly using germ warfare, sabotaging crop yields, and more, the US Army also slaughtered Koreans in the south, such as the No Gun Ri massacre.

The Budapest Memorandum was explicitly stated to not be legally binding. It wasn’t guarantees, but assurances, and the US broke these assurances first:

“Although the Memorandum is not legally binding, we take these political commitments seriously and do not believe any U.S. sanctions, whether imposed because of human rights or non-proliferation concerns, are inconsistent with our commitments to Belarus under the Memorandum or undermine them. Rather, sanctions are aimed at securing the human rights of Belarusians and combating the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and other illicit activities, not at gaining any advantage for the United States”.

This was the reasoning given for sanctioning Belarus in 2013. The west backing the far-right Banderite coup in 2014 was an even greater violation of Ukrainian sovereignty. Ukraine also did not give up “its” nukes, but returned the soviet nukes Moscow had stationed there prior to the dissolution of the USSR that were a part of the multi-national nature of the soviet union.

The Budapest Memorandum was neither binding nor respected by the west to begin with.

You’re using queerness as a hammer to insult homophobes, which just throws gay people under the bus. Your smug condescension towards me being pan and telling you you’re being homophobic is yet another example of your very traditional, very unearned Euronationalist chauvanism. You’re like a colonial era race scientist, I wouldn’t be surprised if you pulled out calipers next.

Which treaty are you specifically referring to, here? Ukraine had been a hotbed of far-right Banderite influence before they committed the Maidan massacre and couped the state in 2014, and that wasn’t because of Russian influence.

In lots of ways the Russian Federation is behind the USSR, no doubt. Capitalism doesn’t work. That being said, it’s far better than being on the plundered side of imperialism, and that’s why UR has the support it still does. The CPRF rising is a consequence of rising support for socialism.

Socialist states don’t oppress the working classes but the capitalists, fascists, landlords, and imperialists. That’s who the tanks and rifles are for. It’s capitalist states that wield them against the working classes, like the US Empire and its European vassals.

Ukraine broke the treaties, and the Banderites couped the state and started ethnically cleansing Russians. It’s ethnic cleansing, full stop.

It’s simple, nationalists want development for greater profits while imperialists want underdevelopment to retain their superprofits.

No, you’re using gay people as a punchline to fight people you don’t like. As a pansexual man, seeing people like you defend their homophobia because your target is homophobic is not unusual but absolutely perpetuates homophobia.

On the contrary, “tankie” is used against anyone that supports socialism and anti-imperialism. Socialist states have always needed to defend themselves from fascists, insurrection, and imperialism.

“Tankie” was never about “using force to keep the people controlled,” it originated from a split in whether to support the Red Army putting down a fascist uprising in Hungary or not. You’re correct about the origin timeline, but are defending Nazis freed from prison after being jailed during World War II that went on to lynch communists and Jews, just because they were anti-communist.

“Tankie” was a pejorative for Marxists that support socialism in real life then as well as now. It originated in the Communist Party of Great Britain. The term was coined because of the British tendency towards silly-sounding insults, and because the Soviet Union sent in the Red Army to stop the western-backed fascist insurrection. This caused a split in the party (as it always does in western orgs).

The Hungarian revolt in 1956 was infested with anti-semitic pograms. MI6 funded, supplied, and trained the Hungarian counter-revolutionaries. These counter-revolutionaries were allied with fascists who were lynching Jewish people and Communists.

"The special correspondent of the Yugoslav paper, Politika, (Nov. 13, 1956) describing the events of those days, said that the homes of Communists were marked with a white cross and those of Jews with a black cross, to serve as signs for the extermination squads. “There is no longer any room for doubt,” said the Yugoslav reporter, “it is an example of classic Hungarian fascism and of White Terror. The information,” continued this writer, “coming from the provinces tells how in certain places Communists were having their eyes put out, their ears cut off, and that they were being killed in the most terrible ways.”

“But the forces of reaction were rapidly consolidating their power and pushing forward on the top levels, while in the streets the blood of scores of massacred Communists, Jews, and progressives was flowing.”

“Some of the reports reaching Warsaw from Budapest today caused considerable concern. These reports told of massacres of Communists and Jews by what were described as 'Fascist elements’ …” (N.Y. Times, Nov. 1. 1956)

“The evidence is conclusive that the entry of Soviet troops into Budapest stopped the execution of scores, perhaps thousands of Jews, for by the end of October and early November, anti-Semtic pogroms - hallmark of unbridled fascistic terror - were making their appearance, after an absence of some ten years, within Hungary.”

"A correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Maariv (Tel Aviv) reported:

During the uprising a number of former Nazis were released from prison and other former Nazis came to Hungary from Salzburg . . . I met them at the border . . . I saw anti-Semitic posters in Budapest . . . On the walls, street lights, streetcars, you saw inscriptions reading: “Down with Jew Gero!” “Down with Jew Rakosi!” or just simply “down with the Jews!”

Leading rabbinical circles in New York received a cable early in November from corresponding circles in Vienna that “Jewish blood is being shed by the rebels in Hungary.” Very much later-in February, 1957-the World Jewish Congress reported that “anti-Semitic excesses occurred in more than twenty villages and smaller provincial towns during the October-November revolt.” This occurred, according to this very conservative body, because “fascist and anti-Semitic groups had apparently seized the opportunity, presented by the absence of a central authority, to come to the surface.” Many among the Jewish refugees from Hungary, the report continued, had fled from this anti-Semitic pogrom-like atmosphere (N.Y. Times, Feb. 15, 1957). This confirmed the earlier report made by the British Rabbi, R. Pozner, who, after touring refugee camps, declared that “the majority of Jews who left Hungary did so for fear of the Hungarians and not the Russians.” The Paris Jewish newspaper, Naye Presse, asserted that Jewish refugees in France claimed quite generally that Soviet soldiers had saved their lives."

Further, the CIA also backed Hungarian resistance forces:

Prague in 1968 was a similar fascist uprising in both cases there were some elements of progressive protest, but these were greatly overshadowed by the fascist movements. Dubcek wanted to sell out to the IMF, and restore capitalism. The idea that any of this was about “democracy” or “freedom” is silly, it was always about Cold War tactics to destabilize socialism.

TL;DR imagine if the January 6th rioters were armed and trained by foreign governments, started lynching officials and Jewish people, and the US sent in the army to put down the insurrection. The MAGA chuds would claim that it was about “freedom” and “democracy,” but we all know that they just wanted Trump in office.

Nowadays, it’s used by any random anti-communist to refer to anyone that supports socialist states or doesn’t buy into the imperialist narrative about global south countries. It was the ones you call “tankies” that knew the stories of WMD and Saddam’s forces leaving babies outside of incubators were both bullshit to manufacture consent for war, but now that its decades later the anti-communists all suddenly have collective amnesia about their willing participation in spreading the lies of empire to murder hundreds of thousands of people.

Anti-communists, I might add, that you are the modern version of, “left” anti-communists that service empire by attacking the Empire’s enemies for them while not meaningfully opposing the Empire itself. The Zizeks, the Chomskys, the Eric Blairs.

I know quite well what the pejorative you love to hurl means, and its origins. In addition to the liberal viewpoint from wikipedia, I recommend the Prolewiki article on “Tankies,” as well as Nia Frome’s essay “Tankies.” That should give you a more well-rounded view.

You keep making wierd sexual remarks about heads of state, be it Trump or Putin. Casual homophobia, though not nearly as extreme as your racism, I’ll admit.

So you’re defending ethnic cleansing as a “measured response,” like a “final solution,” would you say? Excellent, you keep outing yourself as a fascist more and more. I was wrong, I admit, I thought you were ignoring the evidence of ethnic cleansing instead of supporting the ethnic cleansing.