My thoughts after listening (poorly... I was also writing the rest of this post) are that the people painting themselves as favorable to Ukraine seem a lot more interested in humiliating Putin than preserving Ukraine. They want to inflict casualties upon Russia as if they expect Putin will walk away from this conflict with a loss. But Putin regards this conflict as an inevitable confrontation that it is absolutely necessary for Russia to win and that will be harder for Russia to win the later it is resolved (because Ukraine keeps getting more and more NATO equipment, training, and so on).
So, far better for Ukraine would be to limit the casualties on all sides so that Putin can more easily present the least demanding outcome to his people as a win. The larger the cost of the war on Russia, the harder that is to do. And the harder that is to do, the more demanding Putin will be in a peace settlement in order to satisfy the demands of domestic politics and probably the longer the war will go on because Ukraine will not accept. Ongoing fighting, even the various small victories for Ukrainian forces, are actually counterproductive to the interests of Ukraine.
This doesn't square with the actual trajectory of the war. Early on, Russia invaded on multiple fronts, aiming explicitly for Kyiv, the deposition of the government, and regime change. His soldiers said so; his state media said so; and he said so, on national TV.
The only reason that the goal of complete annexation has been abandoned in favour of "just" the Donbas is a result of ongoing effective resistance making such a goal too costly for Russia to pursue.
I'm justified in not taking a position on how other countries which are targets of US imperialism choose to react to it because frankly it's not my judgment to make; it's a matter for them to decide; my role is in influencing in whatever small way I can how my government and its proxies act. And all I have seen in response when I say so is "but they're bad though". And it's like... OK? They exist in the way that they do in large measure because that was a natural outgrowth of an international order that the United States designed. In the case of Russia, the United States and other western countries literally participated in turning it into an oligarchy. This is what a world order dominated by the gangster capitalists of the United States looks like: it's not pretty. What would you expect?
At some point, governments have to take responsibility for the actions they undertake, I'm afraid.
The vague stuff about how they grew as a "natural outgrowth of the international order" really does not take anyone very far. It's not a justification for
any of this. Y'know,
every country on earth is a natural outgrowth of the surrounding environment in which they found themselves.
And yet most of them-- including ones in much weaker positions!-- have managed to refrain from slaughtering and annexing their neighbours, and have managed to have tolerable living standards with only a fraction of the resources that Russia has at its disposal.
How the Russian government has responded to these situations is their own damn responsibility.
In addition, the international order in Eastern Europe and Northern Asia is also massively dominated by
Russia. The government (for which Vladimir Putin acted as a violent state enforcer before taking the reigns, recall) held direct control over a swathe of republics; directed their governments and economies; sent their people to war; threatened and cajoled others, as the rival superpower to the United States for a century.
Following this, most of those countries chose to turn to European economic integration because (I'm sorry to say) Russia was an absolutely abysmal regional patriarch. It had mountains of natural resources it could have leveraged to improve the lives of the people, but it chose instead to funnel it towards the dynastic oligarchs and military complex. And the "gangster capitalists of the US" didn't force it to do that. The gangster capitalists of Russia did it themselves. It had nothing economic to offer to its former satellites in Eastern Europe, so it turned to military threat, and then acted like a fucking victim when those countries backed
further and further away from it.
And y'know what, the US is a natural outgrowth of an international order, too. Every country is, but especially one that's under 300 years old. The international order that spawned it was, of course, that of the European Empires. Funnily enough, you've managed to finally divorce the US from that context, and to
attribute it responsibility for its own wretched actions. And that preceding international order, by-the-by, was created by quite a few players, but very often chief among them were Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, Austro-Hungary... and Russia.
