Copy and pasting from my previous post. The war in Ukraine is a failure of diplomacy, of parties refusing to listen to each other’s concerns. It could have been easily prevented if one party had been more accommodating of another, but this was never going to happen, because the animosity served the interests of certain parties as you shall learn below:

Hinge Points (Hexbear edition): Ukraine

The events leading to the war in Ukraine did not happen overnight. It was the consequence of a decade of diplomacy failures, and was 100% preventable if only a couple things had gone differently along the entire chain of events.

1 ) The 2013 Maidan coup in Ukraine would never have happened if everyone had just gone with Putin’s suggestion of holding a tripartite meeting so they can revise the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement (AA-DCFTA) such that European goods could not flood the Russian market without paying for tariffs (due to Ukraine’s existing tariff-free agreement with Russia). Putin did NOT object to Ukraine signing the agreement, simply that they revise the clauses for the tariff-related issues. The EU declined to meet.

Of course, Russia was looking out for its own economic interests and wanted Ukraine to join their Eurasian Customs Union, which was flatly rejected by the EU for being incompatible with the DCFTA (Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement), which would have required Ukraine to liberalize its economy (i.e. remove tariff barriers to allow foreign goods to enter), while the Customs Union would have a common external tariff to prevent “re-exportation”. Nonetheless, it should be noted that Russia did not reject Ukraine from signing the AA-DCFTA so long as their economic concerns were addressed.

(Note: Ukraine did get screwed by the AA-DCFTA which was signed after the Maidan coup, just as Russia warned. Europe ended up protecting its own market while taking advantage of cheap Ukrainian agricultural imports, and they didn’t even get the loans like the Greeks did (which was a disastrous and shitty deal for Greece). That’s how bad Ukraine was treated by the EU - their economy literally crumbled after siding with the EU post-2014)

Instead, the European imperialists got greedy and wanted to eat into Russia’s market, thinking that Russian economy is too weak to do anything against them and therefore ripe for bullying.

2 ) The 2013 Maidan coup probably would not have happened if EU didn’t force Ukraine to take IMF loans.

Ok, you’re Ukraine, signing the agreement with EU is going to lose you trade revenues with Russia if you don’t revise the clause of tariff, fine, but now you’re being forced to take IMF loans that demand cutting social spending and education as well? That’s just you signing your own slave contract.

Ukraine’s then president, Viktor Yanukovych, whom I assure you was very pro-EU and not a Russian stooge in any way, was stumped by the demands and asked for more time to negotiate with Russia. He did not reject the EU agreement, nor did he take any deal from Moscow. He simply postponed signing the agreement, and that was enough to be couped by the fascists before he could do anything about it.

Of course, the imperialists have always had in their minds the perfect economic warfare against both Russia (destroy its domestic industries by flooding Russian market with EU goods through “free trade agreement”) and Ukraine (through IMF debt that demanded austerity). They simply couldn’t help not impoverishing the countries at their periphery through their cleverly-devised economic policies.

3 ) The 2014 Ukrainian Civil War would most likely not have happened if the fascist coup regime didn’t ban Russian language in Donbass.

Ok, so the coup happened, you’re now under a new management. Fine, but the fascists couldn’t help themselves by lashing out at the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.

The very first act of the coup regime on February 22nd, 2014 was to repeal the Kolesnychenko-Kivalov Language Law, a 2012 bill that granted the status of regional language to Russian and other minority languages. The law was in full accordance to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages for the preservation of language-minority rights and had widespread societal support in Ukraine. The repeal of the Kolesnychenko-Kivalov Language Law by the fascist regime marked a severe infringement of minority rights and their intent to ethnically cleanse Russian culture in the country.

Clashes between both sides started to ramp up and the highly tense situation would quickly devolve into the Ukrainian Civil War.

Russia was forced (by design, I should say) into the conflict because the Ukrainian army was being mobilized to fight against the Donbass separatists, a region where ethnic Russians are the majority.

Of course, the imperialists couldn’t help it: they believed that they could cripple Russia’s economy by involving it in two fronts - Syria and Ukraine - at the same time. Surely Russia had no capacity to fight two wars at the same time? Crimea was immediately annexed by Russia for obvious reasons, and I still remember Western pundits laughing at Russia thinking that there’s no way they have the capability to build the Crimean Bridge.

4 ) Implementing the Minsk agreements could have marked the peaceful ending to this conflict.

Ok, the Ukrainian armed forces were defeated by the Donbass militia aided by Russian military in the civil war. A peace deal had been brokered. Russia said: “ok we don’t want to deal with this Donbass shit anymore, can you take them back please? Just promise not to commit genocide or ethnic cleansing in the region. We just want to continue doing business with Europe, we’ve been sanctioned enough and we really don’t want to get bogged down by this shit in Ukraine.”

Minsk was supposed to be the path for a peaceful return of Donbass to Ukraine, but with increased autonomy to the local governments, so that nobody can impose a nation-wide ban on language and culture without regards for the people living in the regions.

However, the fascists couldn’t help it and immediately broke the truce, leading to them being beaten once again. The German chancellor Merkel and the French president Hollande actually had to drag Putin back to the negotiation table and promised to be the guarantors of Minsk II: that Ukraine will really stick to the plan this time.

Interestingly, both Merkel and Hollande have since admitted publicly in 2022 that the Minsk agreements were simply to buy time for Ukraine to be militarized. Why does Ukraine need time to militarize? There really is only one answer to this question: to militarily re-capture Donbass and Crimea instead of implementing the peace plan.

5 ) NATO arming Ukraine exacerbated Russia’s security concerns

Ok, so you have a peace plan, but instead of start holding talks toward a concrete resolution, what Russia saw was Ukraine being armed and trained by NATO over 7 years.

Once again, Russia proved to be the idiot in this conflict by actually believing that Ukraine was ever going to implement Minsk agreement. And yes, Putin is an idiot. Surely his good friend Angela Merkel would never lie to him?

Of course, the Western imperialists truly believe in the supremacy of NATO military equipments and tactics that if you have a fully NATO-trained Ukrainian army, they would be able to beat Russia’s obsolete military quite easily.

I will also add that the Nazi regiments, now fully incorporated into the Ukrainian armed forces, have never been prosecuted for their atrocities committed against civilians in the Donbass. They were glorified as heroes in state media.

6 ) Biden’s aggressive policy in Ukraine made Russia’s worst fear came true

In 2021, the new Biden administration began to pivot aggressively against Russia. After the meeting between Biden and Zelensky (who was elected as a peace president and was supposed to bridge the divide between Ukraine and Russia) in Washington, the latter started to spout aggressive rhetorics that increasingly alarmed the Russians, such as talks about Ukraine joining NATO.

That former Soviet republics joining NATO has always been the thorny issue for Russia since the end of the Cold War, and Ukraine was to be the center-piece of this increasing encirclement of Russia that has been ongoing since the 1990s. There is not a single government in Russia, whether they lean left or right, that will not be alarmed by this development, given their prior encounter with the Nazis some 80 years back. And it’s the same Banderites in Ukraine this time, not some generic fascists.

7 ) The last ditch effort to stop the war

At this point, at least for the Russians, it was pretty clear that the new administration is going to ramp up its belligerent foreign policy against Russia. There was only one last thing to do: a last ditch effort to persuade Washington to stop its aggression.

The Russian diplomatic team prepared hundreds of pages of proposal, hoping to convince the other side of the seriousness of its security concerns, and Russia-US summit was conducted in June 2021 to resolve the crisis. Instead, the US sent Javelins and Stingers to Ukraine, first in August 2021, then in December - completely laughing in Russia’s face about their security concerns.

If you were Russia, what would you think of the American’s responses? Would you think that they were being serious about addressing your security concerns? If you told your harasser to stop, and they resume stalking you the following week, what would that tell you?

Soon, Zelensky started to talk about joining NATO, commenting about abandoning the Budapest Memorandum that was the basis of non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, the increased mobilization of military units towards the eastern front (Donbass), and the increased shelling of the regions by the Ukrainian side.

The diplomatic solution has failed.

My understanding is less complete than many of the other socialists. The other communists can explain this better than I can.

Capitalist Logic behind expansion into Russia

The American state continues to exist because its inhabitants an elevated standard of living due to unequal exchange with the third world. It operates on a more developed and sophisticated method of colonial extraction that it inherited in its more primitive state from the British Empire.

It’s current form leans more towards predatory finance, withholding access to USD and trade networks which other more theoretically developed socialists will be able to explain in more detail.

The simplest way to illustrate this logic, which is the only logic governing the state, is you can recursively extract wealth by taking low value-form (unrefined, i.e ore) goods from a vulnerable country, use your means of production to turn them into higher value from goods (i.e stainless steel medical needles) and sell it back to the third world country in order to buy more raw materials. You use this surplus to buy land, corporations, additional means of production, at home, in the colony, and abroad, and use this advantage to set up the necessary apparatus to keep this extraction going in perpetuity. Else the ‘native’ population will seek to retain this surplus value in order to develop their own means of production and cut out the colonizer entirely. The American state cannot survive if this happens, the only way to keep the economy moving once the logic of capital has broken (no returns on investment) and maintain the living standards expected by the American population is to transition to a centralized planned economy.

Inevitability of Communism and Socialism, peaceful transition and violent reaction

The American state has done this many times in the past when it felt threatened, it used a command economy to a great extent during the Roosevelt Era (WW2) and the Keynesian period that followed it. There was even an understanding between the Roosevelt Administration, and CPSU under General Secretary Joseph Stalin, that the American economy, in its highly potent and planned form, would logically, eventually, peacefully transition to the fully planned and superior socialist mode of production. Post WW2 would be peaceful co-existence between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the natal centrist Social Democratic United States, this was obviously quashed after the death of Roosevelt, and the existing internal powers of the United States in the 1940s to now would never cede power.

The problem with the Keynesian model of the Roosevelt period, is that domestic production and full employment gives labor - workers - an almost unlimited amount of proportional leverage. The United States saw massive organized labor action in the early 20th century. The Communist Party of the United States had meetings and marches numbering in the tens of thousands in New York City alone. The marginalized communities of the United States, black radicals, indigenous radicals, and queer radicals would consolidate and force the United States into socialism. White supremacy would be rooted out by revolutionary workers councils, that we know as soviets. The transition to socialism in the United States, and therefore, the world, was inevitable.

In order to prevent this, the former aristocrats and golden-era bourgeoisie, inheritors of the American, and British Empire, enjoyers of the virtually unlimited amounts of wealth, the ability to wield virtually unlimited power, to commit unrestricted violence, access to personal armies, personal islands, yachts, women and children, accumulated via the aforementioned methods of extraction described above, would defend their positions, and defend their holdings, just as anybody in power today, and their forebearers have done (else we would have transitioned to socialism already, as power structures do not hold the tides history at bay on thin air).

Russia Today

Fast forward to today (because I’m getting tired). The Soviets, the lone surviving internationalist socialist revolution, was brought down by material limits and 70 years of an uninterrupted defensive war against the United States. The democratic socialists, social democrats and Keynesians had long ago lost the struggle for power in the United States, the path of peaceful co-existence permanently foreclosed - if it ever existed to begin with, and now the international positions of socialist construction were scattered to the winds. The Communist Party of China strategically retreated, using their vast and highly educated population to seize the means of production from within the world capitalist system.

The Russian Federation, spitting on the ashes of the Soviet dream of a socialist world and the bodies of every democratic socialist riddled by the guns and bombs of reaction, attempted to build a capitalist order amid the unending Western looting of public assets, land and means of production in the 90s. The traitors to the Soviet Union were promised the same levels of wealth and power held by their Western counterparts, they could not bear the embarrassment of being the dredges managing a resource colony pillaged by the West, they wanted autonomy and power - and they had both the education and opportunity to do so. Putin represents this consolidation of Russian national interests, the antithesis of the internationalist mission of the Soviets that they killed. The Russian national bourgeois, the scum that they are, did not want to cede power to the far greater global bourgeois.

I cannot say why the Russian capitalists did not integrate into the world capitalist system. Maybe it was pride. Maybe, from the West, it was spite. Maybe enough Marxist Soviet education persisted to allow them to remember what happens to the little capitalists.

This bloc has its own interests to defend. Not enough capital to export into other countries - not enough to carry out imperialism, not enough to buy out means of production abroad, not enough financial muscle to meaningfully subsume sovereign governments to their whims. Russia only exports roughly 5% of the Capital that the United States exports. Their only paths to international influence and national defense involve picking up the pieces of the anti-colonial struggle left behind by the Soviet Union - on behalf of capitalist governments, little capitalists like them, rather than the side of the labourers armed, educated, and trained by the Soviets. So weakened is their position that they are occasionally, even patronizingly, forced to align with socialist movements. Rarely. America is the biggest threat to the Russian Federation, and it will align with anyone willing to do so.

America and the Russian Federation: Big Bourgeoisie vs Little Bourgeoisie

America sought to completely obliterate the Soviet project, to win the great game of conquering Russia undertaken by the great capitalist powers, started long before the creation of the first Petrograd Soviet. It succeeded in shattering the once independent and self-sufficient eastern European republics. Destroying and shattering the independent socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. Only the stubbornest Russians resisted. Absorbing the right-wing reactionary institutions empowered by the United States to overthrow the secular left-wing Soviet Union. The United States was once again fighting it’s own reactionary puppet just as it had in Afghanistan.

Ukraine is one of these reactionary puppet states. Still loyal to its western owners. In order to keep and advance the unending extraction of surplus value and extend its reach to Moscow the west inflames racial tensions that were once virtually inexistent and pathetic during the anti-racist and solidarity-based Soviet era. No one listened to these fools until the Americans gave them guns. No one listened until they started shooting and killing.

American Race Wars

The fighting in the Donbass and Crimea is the culmination of a one-sided race war set alight by the United States. Architected by the same fascists that would do the same at home if given the opportunity. Inheritors of the same apparatus created by those that truly did fight a race war against Jews and Slavs during the second world war - NATO - when the United States absorbed the ashes and remaining radicals and fighters and leaders of Nazi Germany into the ranks of their anti-socialist crusade. Right wingers never let a good opportunity, good means, good weapons, fighters and terrorists - go to waste.

Ukrainian fascists, the big bourgeoise’s faction of choice, would fight a holy race war on their former neighbors in the Soviet Union. Once acceptable differences were enflamed, and the most violent were now given access to high explosive artillery and told to fire into the capital cities of Russian majority provinces.

The race war in Ukraine was supposed to draw the Russian Federation into another Afghanistan, to turn it even more into an international Pariah and swing the entire world capitalist system like an executioner’s axe on the little bourgeoisie. But the anti-materialism and rot at the heart of the world capitalist order is clearly setting in. They clearly can’t do it. The mistakes piled on that anti-colonialists in the Global South sense the weakness of their former masters. And they’ve brought a decent portion of the little bourgeois from all over the world together under the leadership of a Communist Superpower that governs almost 1/5th of the entire World Population.

My explanation is not representative of other socialists views or interpretations, I’m not a party member or part of a cadre, I am just a poster.

While there is diversity of opinion on Hexbear (wow that bit sounded really ChatGPT of me I’m sorry, Im literally currently playing with it lol) most folks on Hexbear agree that while Putin’s decision to invade was a reprehensible one, the the decision was provoked by Ukraine and the West via NATO encirclement (and its important to understand that NATO has always inherently been a hostile power to Russia as to why the encroachment of NATO would provoke Russia) and also the War in Donbass and the treatment of the ethnic Russians there.

Just wanted to say I appreciate you wanting to engage in good faith

Just watch this video (about 12 and a half minutes):

https://hexbear.net/post/347083

For a more “academic” (by that I mean one by a professor at a university), see this: https://hexbear.net/post/347122

Ukraine’s government was overthrown in 2014, and the new government banned certain opposition parties, which alienated a lot of people in eastern Ukraine, many of whom have cultural ties to Russia, and a seperatist movement seized control of Donbas. The two sides signed a cease-fire, Minsk II, but Ukraine violated that cease-fire by shelling civilian targets, causing Russia to answer the request for aid by the seperatists.

The perspective of NATO supporters is that the seperatists are just a Russian proxy while the Russian perspective is that Ukraine’s new government is a NATO proxy. It’s difficult to evaluate what people actually want, but the fact that Ukraine felt the need to ban opposition parties and the fact that there are a bunch of people with Russian ties in the disputed territories indicates that the seperatists have some genuine support.

There were many diplomatic off-ramps that could’ve been taken to avoid the conflict, such as upholding the cease-fire, or perhaps giving the disputed territories a referendum to leave. As it stands, the war has reached a standstill and the general perspective here is that Ukraine can either give up some territorial concessions now, or give up some territorial concessions after throwing a bunch more lives into the meat grinder. Peace now is the best option for the Ukrainian people, but likely US pressure will keep the war going because it’s profitable for the defense industry.

Also, Ukraine has a significant Nazi problem, including both paramilitary groups and the government itself. For instance, Ukraine had to fire their ambassador to Germany after he engaged in Holocaust denial right on TV.

Hey I just want to thank you for engaging in this discussion in good faith. Its always good to be curious and ask questions when you encounter a perspective different than your own (unless that perspective is some rabid racist baying for the blood of the innocent lol).

I just want to give you a video that’s very approachable that helped give me some context on this whole war. It’s only 18 minutes long. https://youtu.be/LL4eNy4FCs8?si=Csj6WpYhwOEDeRbx