Hello,
I was listening to Red Menace with Alyson Escalante and Breht O’Shea and I find their geopolitical analysis through dialectical materialist frameworks useful and most of their takes I agree with, but their episode on the Ukraine-Russia war frustrated me.
Their rhetoric around the Ukrainian nationalism is confusing. It puts the blame solely on NATO expansionism but I feel like that ignores centuries of Russian chauvinism in Ukraine. I here complaints that Ukrainians are oppressing Russian speaking parts of Ukraine but under the Soviet Union, Ukrainian intellectuals and writers were executed and by the 1980s, Ukrainian schools were severely reduced. For example, only one of 32 schools in Chernihiv taught in Ukrainian. This often gets brushed aside as a “mistake” that Marxists-Leninists will learn from in future revolutions but contemporary conversations around Ukraine still ignore this fundamental reality.
I genuinely curious about more ML interpretations of this history.