In this episode, I have Isabella Aidar on the podcast to discuss Russia and the Russia-Ukraine war through an anti-imperialist and socialist lens. We began our conversation by examining Europe’s economic self-sabotage and its elites' complicity in prolonging the conflict to serve US geopolitical hegemony. We then traced the deeper structural roots of the war beyond the mainstream narrative that history started in 2022. We also deconstructed the false liberal equivalence between Ukraine and Palestine and looked at how Ukraine's alignment with Israel and strikes on Iranian assets expose the global architecture of Western imperialism and, consequently, the anti-imperialist forces. Furthermore, we challenged the unhelpful framework of "Russian imperialism," instead analyzing Russia's engagement in the Global South, particularly in West Africa's Sahel region. Finally, we discussed the extent to which Russia can be understood as an anti-imperialist actor and whether its ongoing war should be supported as an anti-imperialist war.
Isabella Aidar, known online as Socialista Champagne, is a Brazilian‑Canadian political educator, writer, and UX & interface designer for Tech for Palestine. With a focus on anti-imperialism, geopolitics, and applying historical and dialectical materialism, Isabella’s goal is to make materialist analysis and Marxist-Leninist theory accessible to a wide range of audiences coming from all sorts of biases and ideological backgrounds.
Socialista Champagne on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/socialista.champagne/
Socialista Champagne on Substack: https://socialistachampagne.substack.com/
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