It looks like we need to unpack what the phrase critical support actually means. Communists don’t look at the Russian Federation and imagine the Soviet Union, nor does nobody think Putin is building socialism. The support is a strategic judgment about the global balance of forces, rooted in a materialist reading of where the primary contradiction lies rather than having anything to do with Russia’s internal character.

The primary contradiction in the world is a bloc conflict between Western imperialist states, led by the United States, and the Global South. Western imperialism is the system that enforces economic extraction through debt, sanctions, military bases, trade rules, enabled by dollar’s reserve status. It’s the force that has strangled development in the Global South and consistently prevented any alternative path of development from gaining traction. As long as that system remains unchallenged there can be no space for experiments in socialism or even genuinely sovereign capitalist development that could later be transformed. That makes breaking Western hegemony a prerequisite for any meaningful change going forward.

Russia currently acts as the main military force directly challenging American led unipolar order. While it’s not doing it for communist reasons, their push against NATO expansion and efforts to build alternative financial and trade architectures with BRICS are objectively opening fractures in Western dominance. Russia bogs down NATO in Ukraine and exposes the limits of Western power which, in turn, weakens the imperialist camp creating room for left movements to grow around the world.

So when communists say they critically support Russia, we are not endorsing Russia’s internal political system, its capitalist class, nationalist ideology, or its treatment of workers and leftists inside its borders. Our support is conditional and tactical, extending only as far as Russia acts as a counter hegemonic force. The moment Russia pivots toward trying to carve up the world with Western powers or becomes a new oppressor of weaker nations in a way that simply replaces current imperialist hierarchy, that support goes away. Communists are internationalists who see the current moment as one where the central task as weakening the main enemy.

I’ll use a historical parallel to help make this all more concrete. Communists critically supported the Allied powers against nazi Germany during the second world war even though the Allies were capitalist imperialists themselves, and just as is the case with Russia today, no one mistook Churchill or Roosevelt for being socialists. The point was that fascism represented the most aggressive and immediate threat to the working class and to the possibility of socialist advance. Today, that threat happens to be Western imperialism with its endless hot wars along with economic warfare against the rest of the world. And the scope of critical support is about actively disrupting Western imperialism.

We live in a world where the US and its vassals can dictate terms to everyone else, and breaking Western hegemony leads to one with more possibilities for mass movements and resource sovereignty creating more room for socialist organizing. Russia’s resistance helps crack that door open, and that’s why it makes sense to make tactical alignment on one particular axis of struggle while maintaining full independence on all others which is what giving critical support is.