Imperialism (led by the US and reinforced by other western allies) is the current and ongoing primary contradiction, not a lack of local communism. Russia is positioned in opposition to US/western imperialism, so we give them “critical support” in their efforts to combat the global capitalist empire, but do not give them credit for being a capitalist regime.

The western empire is the single biggest obstacle to communism and the most consistent in pushing violent anti-communist tendrils across the globe, on top of having a history of orchestrating violent coups and other means of control over nation-states that simply defy imperialist or colonial control, even if they are not really “communist” in practice. One of the most prevalent examples being the major part that the western empire played in destroying the USSR and thus, leading to the capitalist conditions of current day Russia.

It’s not about whether Putin is better or worse than Zelensky in some individual-focused way, or whether Russia is a better or worse government than Ukraine. Ukraine at this stage is effectively a proxy for NATO expansion (NATO being a tool of the western empire) and Russia is defying NATO’s advancement on its borders in fighting with it. But that is just touching on it on a vague level. This thread has lots of great resources on understanding the Ukraine-Russia conflict and how it started: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7357678

Russia is not imperialist, see an explanation on why here: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Imperialism#Russian_"imperialism"

In general, what you are probably facing up against is the tendency for western imperialist propaganda to oversimplify and claim equivalence of things that are not equivalent. Russia is difficult to even compare to another nation because of its unique history, being both a major part in a staggeringly influential and effective mass marxist socialist state project (the USSR) and also being part of the same project that fell and was reduced to a capitalist mess. It is made more complicated by how it has not been reduced to simply being another servant of the western empire after the loss of the USSR, but has ended up in opposition to it still in one form or another.

It is also one of the most consistently and prolifically vilified countries, due to decades of Cold War propaganda, both during the height of the Cold War and after the USSR’s fall. It is not surprising then that some people would have a hard time wrapping their head around it as neither hero nor villain and as part of a complex dynamic on the world stage, with an even more complex history, grappling with challenging material conditions throughout. But embracing that complexity is an important exercise in getting used to viewing the world beyond the binary lens of good and evil that anti-communist propaganda loves to do.

“We need to pillage more from social services to give to military contractors. How else are we going to drop hundreds of bombs on hundreds or thousands of years old regions of the world in an attempt to erase them and their people from existence, so we can put up a golf course there? Who is going to be there to accelerate climate change and destroy the ecosystem if NATO falls? We have to be able to teach these civilized peoples how to be more barbaric, or else they might want world peace through self determination and mutually beneficial interdependence, and that’s just bad for business.” (if they were honest)