I agree that there is a great deal of magical thinking and rationalization at play. This war has been a catastrophe all-around. It has led to countless civilian deaths, the revitalization/expansion of NATO and a significant depletion of the forces and materiel of the Russian Federation.

Literally every one of your premises is false. It is not a “war of aggression” and while we obviously do not support Putin, for a variety of reasons, the main ones being that he is an anti-communist, a liberal and he encourages reactionary social tendencies, he is also none of the things you described him as.

It is hard to believe that this is not a troll post when in the span of a few sentences you managed to regurgitate such a high number of western imperialist propaganda talking points and repeated a half dozen of the silly names they call Putin to demonize him: “oligarch”, “richest man in the world”, “warlord”, “megalomanial” [sic], “autocrat fascist” and “tyrant”. But i’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and explain.

Let’s start from the top: firstly, there are oligarchs in Russia with close ties to the government but Putin himself is not an oligarch. You may want to look up the definition of the term if you are confused. In Russia the oligarchs are primarily those opportunistic capitalists who after the fall of the USSR managed to amass great wealth and economic-political power by gaining ownership over a significant portion of the old state industries. Putin was not among them. Putin was a bureaucrat first and then a career politician.

Secondly, there is not a single shred of evidence for the liberal media concocted myth that he is “the richest man in the world”. These allegations have never been substantiated by anything factual. They are based solely on the argument that “well, the Russian state owns X property and Putin controls the state, therefore Putin owns all of X”. It is nonsense.

Further, calling him a “warlord” is just silly, i shouldn’t even have to explain why. He does not lead a military government, he is an elected president and head of state of a civilian government. Whether or not his election was or was not legitimately democratic (by whichever measure we want to judge that) is beside the point. Like all elections in bourgeois democracies Russian elections underrepresent the working class and favor the interests of the bourgeoisie. But he is no less legitimate than any western elected official,

In fact it could be argued he has more legitimacy than most of his western counterparts as even western conducted polls that are biased against him show that his popularity is genuinely quite high. As communists we understand that this does not change the class character of his bourgeois government but it shows that many people in Russia at least in part associate the recovery that Russia has experienced since the disastrous 1990s with Putin’s governance.

As for “autocrat” that depends on whether you consider the executive powers of a president inherently autocratic. That would make the US or French presidents also autocrats. However this is a meaningless accusation anyway and unbecoming of a socialist because if Putin is an autocrat then so was and is every leader of any socialist state. Liberals accuse any leader they dislike of being an “autocrat”.

So let’s simplify the discussion and look at the literal definition of “autocrat” as meaning a sole ruler with absolute power. Doing even cursory investigation of how the Russian government works we find it simply does not apply. Putin does not have unchecked autocratic power, he is checked by the Russian parliament and a number of various other governing bodies of the Russian Federation. The decision making is very much collaborative and involves a whole strata of political elites. The problem is that as in all bourgeois democracies these governing bodies and elites represent and advance the interests of the bourgeoisie first and foremost.

As for whether or not he is a fascist this opens up a whole discussion about what fascism actually is. Is social democracy just social fascism? Many leftists would also argue that the US is and has been fascist since its inception, if not towards everyone to begin with then at least toward black and indigenous people. Where even is the difference between fascism and the regular dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that we have in every capitalist country?

However if we assume for the sake of this discussion that the western liberal bourgeois democracies are not what we mean when we say fascist then neither is Russia. Russia is not in any qualitative or quantitative way more authoritarian or reactionary than the US, and in many ways it is less so. And no, fascism is not simply when people have reactionary tendencies. Otherwise most of the world would be full of fascists.

Of course we can never know what someone truly believes but at least overtly Putin himself does not seem to be ideologically fascist. He can be best described as a moderate nationalist liberal. There are people and groups in Russia with legitimately fascist ideology and the centrist Putin government sometimes flirts with them but on the whole it seems to want to keep them marginalized. Russia is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state, if a real fascist, ultra-nationalist political movement was to gain traction Russia would almost certainly devolve into internal chaos. It is not in the interests of the Russian bourgeoisie to allow that.

And as of late fascist ideology has become even more unpopular in Russia as they are at war with an actually fascist state. A state that openly worships Nazi collaborators as its national heroes, which has adopted fascist slogans and a racist, genocidal, fascist ideology, and whose soldiers are covered in Nazi insignia. A large number of Russian neonazis have gone over to the side of Ukraine and are now fighting against Russia.

Finally, calling Putin a “tyrant” is just a repeat of the accusation of being an autocrat which is simply not factual. All of these cliche expressions you have used that are lifted straight out of western media’s anti-Russian propaganda are essentially rehashings of the old racist “oriental despotism” trope. As communists must understand our class enemies and to understand what they are and what they are not. And Putin is many things we dislike and oppose but he is not the caricature that the West paints him as.

Enough about Putin, on to the war itself. The claim that it was started solely by Putin for “megalomanial” reasons is simply infantile. Not only is it embarrassing and unserious to engage in this sort of individualizing, psycho-pathologizing of complex geopolitical conflicts, it is evidence of either intent of deception or catastrophic ignorance. Conflicts between nations do not start because one person felt like starting a war. They are the result of complex processes and contradictions, often having built up for a long time.

This conflict did not start in 2022, it started at least as far back as 2014. I won’t repeat the history, you can read about it elsewhere, but suffice to say there was already a conflict happening way before Russia intervened. And Russia intervened because it was left no other choice. Not only was the expansion of NATO into the now fascist state of Ukraine becoming an existential threat, but the ethnically Russian Donbass region of Ukraine, which in 2014 rebelled against the US orchestrated fascist coup d’etat, had come under serious threat of being attacked and overrun by the spring of 2022. No Russian government could have stood by and allowed this.

Putin himself in fact was among the most reticent in Russia about taking direct military action to resolve the problem. For many years forces in Russia that sympathized with the Donbass had been pushing the Russian government to do more, to intervene directly. Multiple different diplomatic approaches were tried, none of which led anywhere, not least of all because the West, as has now been admitted, never had any intentions of negotiating in good faith and did everything it could to push Russia toward war in hopes that this would result in the fall of the Putin government and the renewed subjugation of Russia to western imperialism.

For all intents and purposes this is an act of self-defense by Russia, on behalf of itself and on behalf of the Russians in the Donbass. By the precedent that NATO itself set during the Yugoslav wars Russia recognized the secession of the Donbass republics and invoked the UN article on collective self-defense, making their intervention legal by international law and defensive.

We support Russia’s anti-fascist intervention not only on moral and legal grounds but more importantly because it is a major blow against US imperialism itself, and we recognize it as a fact that US imperialist hegmony is the biggest obstacle to socialism and socialist states everywhere. A defeat for NATO in this proxy war is a victory for the global proletariat. Anti-imperialist, anti-fascist struggle IS class war. Like the first cold war, this new cold war of the US against Russia and China represents a global dimension of the class war.