I hope that it will stille day be recognized, that Syria deserves to receive a significant part of those frozen Russian assets.
Syria today is destroyed in what was the blueprint of the terrorbombings now conducted against Ukraine.
I think it's extremely important not to forget this as it constitutes another type of "western" blindness. The same groups - and even more than those - refused any kind of support for the Syrian revolution. The term 'Antiimperialism of Idiots' was cones by Syrian anarchist and activist Leila Al-Shami in 2018.
Seeing Ukraine means remembering Syria. Especially if we are to confront campism
Nathaniel Flakin, a Berlin-based editor of Left Voice (the English-language outlet of the Trotskyist Fraction), responded to Ashley Smith's sharing of the article "You Handed Us Over: Ukrainian and Russian socialists judge the Western left" by dismissing Red Mole as "an AI-generated website with tons of nonsensical texts." He was corrected by a reader who pointed to Red Mole's stated editorial method, assistive AI tools guided by human analysis and argument.
This is revealing, because Flakin's real disagreement is not about technology. It is about Ukraine.
Left Voice and the Trotskyist Fraction argue that Ukraine's war is not a national liberation struggle comparable to Vietnam or Ireland. Flakin contends that socialists who frame it as such end up aligning with Western imperialism, and that genuine self-determination requires the Ukrainian working class to become an independent political force, breaking with both NATO and Russian imperialism.
Left Voice opposes arms shipments to Ukraine on the grounds that Western military aid serves US strategic interests rather than Ukrainian self-determination, and has called for direct action to block weapons transports. Flakin has argued that every imperialist power finds supposedly progressive goals to justify its wars, and that supporting arms deliveries tells the working class that part of the West's massive military budgets serve a historically progressive aim.
In short, Left Voice conditions Ukraine's right to self-determination on a prior socialist revolution: break with NATO, expropriate the oligarchs, nationalise imperialist capital, then you may resist invasion with the left's blessing. This is not a serious strategic position. It is an ultimatum delivered to a people under bombardment. No nation in history has been required to complete a socialist revolution before earning the right to resist occupation. Vietnam received Soviet arms without Hanoi first meeting a purity test set by American Trotskyists. The Spanish Republic accepted whatever materiel it could get. James Connolly took German rifles. Self-determination is either a democratic right or it is a reward for correct class politics. It cannot be both.
Dismissing the medium rather than engaging the argument is a familiar evasion. Red Mole uses assistive AI for research and drafting; the analysis, thesis, and editorial judgement are entirely human. Whether Flakin agrees with that analysis is a legitimate debate. Whether the person making the argument used a search engine or a language model to check a date is, to put it gently, beside the point.
What does the Ukrainian left thinks will happen if the Ukrainin government wins after calling for the Ukrainian government to get more bombs, more guns? What happens when trade unions try to get these draconian labour laws repealed and the Ukrainian government sends in soldiers to break strikes with western weapons?
You don't fight a corrupt government by giving them even more money and guns. Not to mention the coalition of the willing still exists, so the 'collapse of the proxy argument' doesn't hold up when the UK, France, Germany, Italy and a number of smaller nations are sticking to their support, even if America has sided with the imperialist Russian state.
The "corrupt government / more guns" framing assumes a binary that Ukrainian socialists have explicitly rejected. The Danish discussion article (https://redmole.substack.com/p/what-a-danish-discussion-added-to) sets out four positions, not two: you can support arming Ukraine's self-defence or not, and you can build solidarity with Ukrainian workers' organisations or not. These are independent variables. Sotsialnyi Rukh and KVPU call for both simultaneously: weapons because a Ukrainian government, however hostile to its own workers, is easier to fight on two fronts than a Russian occupation that liquidates every independent trade union, feminist group, and socialist organisation in every territory it controls; and direct labour solidarity because the state's solidarity is state solidarity, and only the workers' movement can do the class work.
The question the comment doesn't answer is: which of those four positions does it actually occupy? Is it organising material solidarity with KVPU or Sotsialnyi Rukh? Is it supporting the right of Ukrainian workers to resist the invasion? If the answer to both is no, then the concern about post-war labour repression is not a strategic position. It is what the Conscription Paradox article (https://redmole.substack.com/p/the-conscription-paradox-why-western) calls "false pacifism": taking the real grievances of Ukrainian workers, stripping them of context, and deploying them as justification for a conclusion those workers reject.
On the aid composition point: the largest components of Western support have been financial and humanitarian, not offensive military hardware. The military element has been weighted toward air defence, anti-tank weapons, and artillery for territorial defence. Twelve years into this conflict, there is no documented case of that aid being used against Ukrainian trade unionists. The scenario the comment raises is speculative; the Russian occupation destroying independent labour movement structures in every controlled territory is not speculative at all. It is documented.
On the coalition of the willing: yes, European support continues, and that matters. But it does not restore the proxy thesis. The proxy argument required Ukraine to be an instrument of unified Western strategy. What actually happened is that Washington sat down with Moscow to carve up Ukrainian territory over Ukrainian heads. If the proxy war analysis were correct, that convergence would be inexplicable. Denys Pilash put it precisely: is Ukraine now fighting a proxy war on behalf of Denmark? Latvia?
The "corrupt government / more guns" objection dissolves under examination. The Republican government in 1936 was suppressing the POUM and dissolving workers' militias. Socialists who withheld solidarity on those grounds are not remembered well. The question was never whether the Largo Caballero government was trustworthy. It was whether Franco should be allowed to win.
I'm sorry but you seem to be missing an extraordinarily obvious understanding of NATO expansion and aggression that's accelerated, by stated design to Russia for decades until a colour revolution in 2014 you don't even mention...
I think this has to be western intelligence because there's no way you can be so ignorant as to your own situation.
You refer to the US mineral deal and the IMF, then somehow suggest the US doesn't support Ukraine? The US is the IMF, it's the greatest imperialist state on Earth! I can promise you, it indeed is invested in Ukraine coming out as Ukraine and not Russia to extract those resources.
You're still getting intelligence, access to satellites, mercenaries and public brainwashing to support your lost cause throughout the US. Is that not massive support? Of course it is so there's that point disproven.
Socialists haven't abandoned you, we're internationalists. You need to struggle in your own Country and heighten your own contradictions. What do you expect us to do? We can't destroy the weapons factories that is prolonging this war because guess what? Those weapons would be going to you - Ukrainians and I don't think you'd welcome that.
Actual revolutionaries are revolutionary defeatists. We want the destruction of our own state so we can be in a better position to build a socialist one from its ashes.
You had decades to organise revolution but instead you decided to not do enough so you would arrive at the position you where in now, a place that even liberal geopolitical analysts have known you would be for literally decades. Now you must accept your situation and struggle within it against NATO and Russia.
Again, I stress: materially do you want our help to weaken NATO, because there is NATO in our Country. (Remember its NATO that is keeping Ukraine Armed Forces armed and Russia back)
Or do you want us to do what exactly to Russia? Its a long way away and doing anything against them would be good for NATO and US, western empires and capital.
Do you understand that at this point Ukraine is fighting a proxy war for the west yet?
Thanks to Sean "Shibby" Middlebrough for engaging with our summary of Ukrainian and Russian socialists' views on the war. Here's my reply: I'd encourage you to actually read the comrades quoted in the article rather than explaining their situation to them. That's precisely the dynamic the piece critiques.
Let me address your specific points, because Ukrainian socialists have already answered every one of them.
On 2014 and NATO expansion. Hanna Perekhoda, Ukrainian socialist and academic, has a term for the argument you're making: "Westsplaining." It treats Ukrainians as objects of great-power rivalry rather than political subjects with their own agency and their own history of resistance. The Maidan was not a CIA colour revolution any more than every popular uprising inconvenient to Moscow is a CIA colour revolution. Ukrainian socialists like Taras Bilous, who was there, have written extensively on this. They don't need you to explain what happened in their own country.
On the US and the IMF. You seem to think the article defends American imperialism. It does the opposite. It documents the US-Ukraine minerals deal, the IMF's 325 structural adjustment conditionalities, and the gutting of Ukrainian labour rights through Law 5371. Ukrainian socialists fight both Russian bombs and IMF austerity simultaneously. That's the entire point of the "two fronts" framework. Vitalii Dudin of Sotsialnyi Rukh describes the minerals deal as "the desire of US capital for unrestricted access to Ukrainian mineral resources." They don't need lectures about American imperialism from people who've never had to choose between a Russian missile and an IMF privatisation demand over breakfast.
On "proxy war." Denys Pilash asked the question your framework cannot answer: "If this is a proxy war, on whose behalf is Ukraine now waging it? The US is clearly not on Ukraine's side; it is converging with Russia." Trump and Putin sat down together at Anchorage to partition Ukraine. Washington and Moscow are on the same side of the table. Your "proxy war" analysis expired the moment it became clear that both imperial powers were carving up the country between them. The article is called "With Washington and Moscow" for a reason.
On revolutionary defeatism. This is the critical error, and it's one Lenin himself would have rejected. Lenin distinguished between imperialist wars between great powers (Serbia 1914) and wars of national liberation by oppressed nations (Ireland 1916). He explicitly argued that national wars by "small, annexed or nationally-oppressed countries against the imperialist powers" remain not only possible but necessary in the imperialist epoch. You are applying the framework for the first category to a conflict that belongs in the second. Sotsialnyi Rukh's response to this argument is blunt: the "both sides should lose" framework is a recipe for Russian victory, which would liquidate every trade union, feminist organisation, and socialist group in the occupied territories. Revolutionary defeatism applied symmetrically to an invaded nation is not Leninism. It is the abandonment of the oppressed dressed up in Leninist vocabulary.
On "you had decades to organise." This is, frankly, grotesque. Ukrainian socialists have been organising under conditions most Western leftists cannot imagine. Bilous joined the Territorial Defence Forces because, as he told International Viewpoint, "if we didn't join the armed forces, the left in Ukraine would cease to exist." Dudin has been fighting for workers' rights under martial law, where 2,747 workers have been injured and 677 killed on the job. Telling people under bombardment that they should have organised harder is the political equivalent of telling someone whose house is on fire that they should have installed sprinklers.
On "what do you want us to do?" They've told you. Repeatedly. Unconditional debt cancellation. Opposition to IMF structural adjustment. Support for Ukrainian trade unions against the Zelensky government's anti-labour laws. Confiscation of frozen Russian oligarch assets for democratic reconstruction. Sanctuary for Russian anti-war exiles. None of this requires "destroying weapons factories." All of it requires taking Ukrainian socialists seriously as political actors rather than explaining their own war to them from a distance.
And here's what the Russian anti-war left says about your position. The Russian Socialist Movement, before being forced to dissolve under "foreign agent" laws, issued a statement titled "Against Half-Solidarity and False Pacifism." They face eight-year prison sentences for their anti-war stance. Average sentences in political cases have risen to eight years; 67 per cent of convictions now result in imprisonment. The Feminist Anti-War Resistance operates through underground cells, writing anti-war slogans on banknotes because visible protest means prison. These people call the position you're articulating the "anti-imperialism of idiots": a framework that ignores their agency and the specific reality of Russian imperialism because it doesn't fit a pre-existing schema where only the West can be the villain.
You ask whether Ukraine is "fighting a proxy war for the West yet." The Ukrainian and Russian socialists quoted in this article have answered that question. You might consider listening to them.
Thank you for the reality check. From 2014 it was obvious to me that mass interference from other countries would be awful for Ukraine. With greed and power-hungry governments eyeing up your resources.
Thanks for this. You're right that 2014 was the hinge point, and the resource dimension has been visible for years to anyone paying attention. The US-Ukraine minerals deal, the IMF conditionalities, the BlackRock-designed reconstruction fund: none of this appeared from nowhere in 2022.
One thing I'd gently push back on, though. The framing of "mass interference from other countries" can inadvertently flatten what happened into a symmetrical story of competing external predators. The reality is asymmetrical. Russia launched a colonial war of annexation. The US and EU attached extractive conditions to the support they offered against that war. Both are forms of imperialism, but they're not equivalent forms, and the distinction matters politically because it determines what solidarity looks like in practice.
Ukrainian socialists like Vitalii Dudin and Denys Pilash hold both of these things simultaneously without losing their footing. They demand arms to resist the invasion and they demand debt cancellation to resist the IMF. They fight Russian bombs in the morning and neoliberal labour law in the afternoon. That "two fronts" framework is, I think, the most sophisticated piece of political analysis to come out of this war, and it's come from the people living through it rather than from those of us watching from a distance.
The greed you identify is real. The question is what we do about it: whether we let that recognition of Western greed become an excuse for inaction (as the campist left has done), or whether we channel it into concrete solidarity with the people fighting both sets of predators at once.
Thank you! This expresses what I have been trying to say for over three years much better than I could ever achieve.
I hope that it will stille day be recognized, that Syria deserves to receive a significant part of those frozen Russian assets.
Syria today is destroyed in what was the blueprint of the terrorbombings now conducted against Ukraine.
I think it's extremely important not to forget this as it constitutes another type of "western" blindness. The same groups - and even more than those - refused any kind of support for the Syrian revolution. The term 'Antiimperialism of Idiots' was cones by Syrian anarchist and activist Leila Al-Shami in 2018.
Seeing Ukraine means remembering Syria. Especially if we are to confront campism
https://leilashami.wordpress.com/2018/04/14/the-anti-imperialism-of-idiots/
The other parts of this series are online at https://redmole.substack.com/t/with-washington-and-moscow
Nathaniel Flakin, a Berlin-based editor of Left Voice (the English-language outlet of the Trotskyist Fraction), responded to Ashley Smith's sharing of the article "You Handed Us Over: Ukrainian and Russian socialists judge the Western left" by dismissing Red Mole as "an AI-generated website with tons of nonsensical texts." He was corrected by a reader who pointed to Red Mole's stated editorial method, assistive AI tools guided by human analysis and argument.
This is revealing, because Flakin's real disagreement is not about technology. It is about Ukraine.
Left Voice and the Trotskyist Fraction argue that Ukraine's war is not a national liberation struggle comparable to Vietnam or Ireland. Flakin contends that socialists who frame it as such end up aligning with Western imperialism, and that genuine self-determination requires the Ukrainian working class to become an independent political force, breaking with both NATO and Russian imperialism.
Left Voice opposes arms shipments to Ukraine on the grounds that Western military aid serves US strategic interests rather than Ukrainian self-determination, and has called for direct action to block weapons transports. Flakin has argued that every imperialist power finds supposedly progressive goals to justify its wars, and that supporting arms deliveries tells the working class that part of the West's massive military budgets serve a historically progressive aim.
In short, Left Voice conditions Ukraine's right to self-determination on a prior socialist revolution: break with NATO, expropriate the oligarchs, nationalise imperialist capital, then you may resist invasion with the left's blessing. This is not a serious strategic position. It is an ultimatum delivered to a people under bombardment. No nation in history has been required to complete a socialist revolution before earning the right to resist occupation. Vietnam received Soviet arms without Hanoi first meeting a purity test set by American Trotskyists. The Spanish Republic accepted whatever materiel it could get. James Connolly took German rifles. Self-determination is either a democratic right or it is a reward for correct class politics. It cannot be both.
Dismissing the medium rather than engaging the argument is a familiar evasion. Red Mole uses assistive AI for research and drafting; the analysis, thesis, and editorial judgement are entirely human. Whether Flakin agrees with that analysis is a legitimate debate. Whether the person making the argument used a search engine or a language model to check a date is, to put it gently, beside the point.
What does the Ukrainian left thinks will happen if the Ukrainin government wins after calling for the Ukrainian government to get more bombs, more guns? What happens when trade unions try to get these draconian labour laws repealed and the Ukrainian government sends in soldiers to break strikes with western weapons?
You don't fight a corrupt government by giving them even more money and guns. Not to mention the coalition of the willing still exists, so the 'collapse of the proxy argument' doesn't hold up when the UK, France, Germany, Italy and a number of smaller nations are sticking to their support, even if America has sided with the imperialist Russian state.
The "corrupt government / more guns" framing assumes a binary that Ukrainian socialists have explicitly rejected. The Danish discussion article (https://redmole.substack.com/p/what-a-danish-discussion-added-to) sets out four positions, not two: you can support arming Ukraine's self-defence or not, and you can build solidarity with Ukrainian workers' organisations or not. These are independent variables. Sotsialnyi Rukh and KVPU call for both simultaneously: weapons because a Ukrainian government, however hostile to its own workers, is easier to fight on two fronts than a Russian occupation that liquidates every independent trade union, feminist group, and socialist organisation in every territory it controls; and direct labour solidarity because the state's solidarity is state solidarity, and only the workers' movement can do the class work.
The question the comment doesn't answer is: which of those four positions does it actually occupy? Is it organising material solidarity with KVPU or Sotsialnyi Rukh? Is it supporting the right of Ukrainian workers to resist the invasion? If the answer to both is no, then the concern about post-war labour repression is not a strategic position. It is what the Conscription Paradox article (https://redmole.substack.com/p/the-conscription-paradox-why-western) calls "false pacifism": taking the real grievances of Ukrainian workers, stripping them of context, and deploying them as justification for a conclusion those workers reject.
On the aid composition point: the largest components of Western support have been financial and humanitarian, not offensive military hardware. The military element has been weighted toward air defence, anti-tank weapons, and artillery for territorial defence. Twelve years into this conflict, there is no documented case of that aid being used against Ukrainian trade unionists. The scenario the comment raises is speculative; the Russian occupation destroying independent labour movement structures in every controlled territory is not speculative at all. It is documented.
On the coalition of the willing: yes, European support continues, and that matters. But it does not restore the proxy thesis. The proxy argument required Ukraine to be an instrument of unified Western strategy. What actually happened is that Washington sat down with Moscow to carve up Ukrainian territory over Ukrainian heads. If the proxy war analysis were correct, that convergence would be inexplicable. Denys Pilash put it precisely: is Ukraine now fighting a proxy war on behalf of Denmark? Latvia?
The "corrupt government / more guns" objection dissolves under examination. The Republican government in 1936 was suppressing the POUM and dissolving workers' militias. Socialists who withheld solidarity on those grounds are not remembered well. The question was never whether the Largo Caballero government was trustworthy. It was whether Franco should be allowed to win.
I'm sorry but you seem to be missing an extraordinarily obvious understanding of NATO expansion and aggression that's accelerated, by stated design to Russia for decades until a colour revolution in 2014 you don't even mention...
I think this has to be western intelligence because there's no way you can be so ignorant as to your own situation.
You refer to the US mineral deal and the IMF, then somehow suggest the US doesn't support Ukraine? The US is the IMF, it's the greatest imperialist state on Earth! I can promise you, it indeed is invested in Ukraine coming out as Ukraine and not Russia to extract those resources.
You're still getting intelligence, access to satellites, mercenaries and public brainwashing to support your lost cause throughout the US. Is that not massive support? Of course it is so there's that point disproven.
Socialists haven't abandoned you, we're internationalists. You need to struggle in your own Country and heighten your own contradictions. What do you expect us to do? We can't destroy the weapons factories that is prolonging this war because guess what? Those weapons would be going to you - Ukrainians and I don't think you'd welcome that.
Actual revolutionaries are revolutionary defeatists. We want the destruction of our own state so we can be in a better position to build a socialist one from its ashes.
You had decades to organise revolution but instead you decided to not do enough so you would arrive at the position you where in now, a place that even liberal geopolitical analysts have known you would be for literally decades. Now you must accept your situation and struggle within it against NATO and Russia.
Again, I stress: materially do you want our help to weaken NATO, because there is NATO in our Country. (Remember its NATO that is keeping Ukraine Armed Forces armed and Russia back)
Or do you want us to do what exactly to Russia? Its a long way away and doing anything against them would be good for NATO and US, western empires and capital.
Do you understand that at this point Ukraine is fighting a proxy war for the west yet?
Thanks to Sean "Shibby" Middlebrough for engaging with our summary of Ukrainian and Russian socialists' views on the war. Here's my reply: I'd encourage you to actually read the comrades quoted in the article rather than explaining their situation to them. That's precisely the dynamic the piece critiques.
Let me address your specific points, because Ukrainian socialists have already answered every one of them.
On 2014 and NATO expansion. Hanna Perekhoda, Ukrainian socialist and academic, has a term for the argument you're making: "Westsplaining." It treats Ukrainians as objects of great-power rivalry rather than political subjects with their own agency and their own history of resistance. The Maidan was not a CIA colour revolution any more than every popular uprising inconvenient to Moscow is a CIA colour revolution. Ukrainian socialists like Taras Bilous, who was there, have written extensively on this. They don't need you to explain what happened in their own country.
On the US and the IMF. You seem to think the article defends American imperialism. It does the opposite. It documents the US-Ukraine minerals deal, the IMF's 325 structural adjustment conditionalities, and the gutting of Ukrainian labour rights through Law 5371. Ukrainian socialists fight both Russian bombs and IMF austerity simultaneously. That's the entire point of the "two fronts" framework. Vitalii Dudin of Sotsialnyi Rukh describes the minerals deal as "the desire of US capital for unrestricted access to Ukrainian mineral resources." They don't need lectures about American imperialism from people who've never had to choose between a Russian missile and an IMF privatisation demand over breakfast.
On "proxy war." Denys Pilash asked the question your framework cannot answer: "If this is a proxy war, on whose behalf is Ukraine now waging it? The US is clearly not on Ukraine's side; it is converging with Russia." Trump and Putin sat down together at Anchorage to partition Ukraine. Washington and Moscow are on the same side of the table. Your "proxy war" analysis expired the moment it became clear that both imperial powers were carving up the country between them. The article is called "With Washington and Moscow" for a reason.
On revolutionary defeatism. This is the critical error, and it's one Lenin himself would have rejected. Lenin distinguished between imperialist wars between great powers (Serbia 1914) and wars of national liberation by oppressed nations (Ireland 1916). He explicitly argued that national wars by "small, annexed or nationally-oppressed countries against the imperialist powers" remain not only possible but necessary in the imperialist epoch. You are applying the framework for the first category to a conflict that belongs in the second. Sotsialnyi Rukh's response to this argument is blunt: the "both sides should lose" framework is a recipe for Russian victory, which would liquidate every trade union, feminist organisation, and socialist group in the occupied territories. Revolutionary defeatism applied symmetrically to an invaded nation is not Leninism. It is the abandonment of the oppressed dressed up in Leninist vocabulary.
On "you had decades to organise." This is, frankly, grotesque. Ukrainian socialists have been organising under conditions most Western leftists cannot imagine. Bilous joined the Territorial Defence Forces because, as he told International Viewpoint, "if we didn't join the armed forces, the left in Ukraine would cease to exist." Dudin has been fighting for workers' rights under martial law, where 2,747 workers have been injured and 677 killed on the job. Telling people under bombardment that they should have organised harder is the political equivalent of telling someone whose house is on fire that they should have installed sprinklers.
On "what do you want us to do?" They've told you. Repeatedly. Unconditional debt cancellation. Opposition to IMF structural adjustment. Support for Ukrainian trade unions against the Zelensky government's anti-labour laws. Confiscation of frozen Russian oligarch assets for democratic reconstruction. Sanctuary for Russian anti-war exiles. None of this requires "destroying weapons factories." All of it requires taking Ukrainian socialists seriously as political actors rather than explaining their own war to them from a distance.
And here's what the Russian anti-war left says about your position. The Russian Socialist Movement, before being forced to dissolve under "foreign agent" laws, issued a statement titled "Against Half-Solidarity and False Pacifism." They face eight-year prison sentences for their anti-war stance. Average sentences in political cases have risen to eight years; 67 per cent of convictions now result in imprisonment. The Feminist Anti-War Resistance operates through underground cells, writing anti-war slogans on banknotes because visible protest means prison. These people call the position you're articulating the "anti-imperialism of idiots": a framework that ignores their agency and the specific reality of Russian imperialism because it doesn't fit a pre-existing schema where only the West can be the villain.
You ask whether Ukraine is "fighting a proxy war for the West yet." The Ukrainian and Russian socialists quoted in this article have answered that question. You might consider listening to them.
Thank you for the reality check. From 2014 it was obvious to me that mass interference from other countries would be awful for Ukraine. With greed and power-hungry governments eyeing up your resources.
Thanks for this. You're right that 2014 was the hinge point, and the resource dimension has been visible for years to anyone paying attention. The US-Ukraine minerals deal, the IMF conditionalities, the BlackRock-designed reconstruction fund: none of this appeared from nowhere in 2022.
One thing I'd gently push back on, though. The framing of "mass interference from other countries" can inadvertently flatten what happened into a symmetrical story of competing external predators. The reality is asymmetrical. Russia launched a colonial war of annexation. The US and EU attached extractive conditions to the support they offered against that war. Both are forms of imperialism, but they're not equivalent forms, and the distinction matters politically because it determines what solidarity looks like in practice.
Ukrainian socialists like Vitalii Dudin and Denys Pilash hold both of these things simultaneously without losing their footing. They demand arms to resist the invasion and they demand debt cancellation to resist the IMF. They fight Russian bombs in the morning and neoliberal labour law in the afternoon. That "two fronts" framework is, I think, the most sophisticated piece of political analysis to come out of this war, and it's come from the people living through it rather than from those of us watching from a distance.
The greed you identify is real. The question is what we do about it: whether we let that recognition of Western greed become an excuse for inaction (as the campist left has done), or whether we channel it into concrete solidarity with the people fighting both sets of predators at once.