this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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Both of you have a wrong understanding of what a state is, what a state does and what its relation to its people is. I would frame it more like this:
Big Country #1: “I will use my people(if they want or not) to pursue my State interests and am willing to get a lot of my people killed to attack your sovereignty and expand my sovereignty"
Smaller Country: "I will use my people(if they want or not) and am willing to get a lot of my people killed to not loose my sovereignty and pursue my state interests"
Big country #2 :"We also have our interests and are willing help defend your state interests(that are not the same as the peoples interest) and sovereignty because they overlap with our state interests"
The mistake is thinking that the state interests of any state are the same as the interests of the people. The Ukraine does not ask itself how it can save most lives and if it may be better to not forcibly recruit their own citizens so that they don't die(same for Russia). The thing is that the Russian people and Ukrainian people don't have to kill each other and would be better of dismantling their states.
That is the whole point of the Lenin quote, to take on a class standpoint and not a nationalistic one.
And to the original meme: I think it is delusional to believe that the Russian state has a special interest in killing as many Ukrainian citizens as possible. I also think it is a very bad idea to take the crimes of war, that happen in every war, for making an argument to continue a war where these crimes happen.
Here is a good article from a german marxist theory magazine(GegenStandpunkt(they are not ML'ers they have a strong beef with ML'ers)) on the topic: sovereignty-and-morality
And maybe you can also watch a short video not directly to the topic of war but on the relation of people to the state and leftists who think nations are in the interest of their people: https://youtu.be/M9rC_BRI_TU Of course this cant go as deep into the topic as it would be necessary but the GegenStandpunkt has a lot of good texts about what a state is.