Ideology and Narrative: How Political Currents in Latin America Shape Perceptions of Russia’s War Against Ukraine

Following the latter premise, one could argue that these inconclusive positions are a way of seeking autonomy from the great powers, especially considering that “some regions of Latin America and the Caribbean have retained a certain nostalgia for the myth of the USSR as a defender against Western imperialism, and Moscow has sought to exploit that nostalgia to generate support, presenting its actions in Ukraine as a دفاعية response to Western expansion”.

In this sense, multilateral bodies do not merely serve as spaces for reaching consensus on international affairs; they also act as an instrument for questioning perspectives within the international order and the power asymmetries embedded in it. Among the main criticisms are the selective application of international norms, the great powers’ scant accountability for violations of international law, and the unequal attention given to certain crises depending on their strategic relevance to Western countries. Thus, the caution shown by governments such as those of Brazil and Mexico regarding the war in Ukraine can be interpreted less as an expression of support for Russia and more as an attempt to avoid aligning with either pole of power in the international system.

While the analysis of votes in multilateral bodies helps reveal the formal positions of each state, the truth is that the differences between the positions of Latin American countries cannot be explained solely by strategic interests or diplomatic ties with the parties involved. Behind each position also lie deep ideological framings that have shaped perceptions of the conflict from various angles. In response to this, it is necessary to examine the main political narratives that emerged in the region around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the way these narratives were reinforced and instrumentalized by different media actors.

Political Narratives and the Construction of Perceptions of the War in Ukraine

The response of Latin American governments to the Russian invasion cannot be reduced to a simple alignment of geopolitical preferences; it largely reflects the activation of ideological frameworks with deep historical roots in the region.

To structure the analysis, it is useful to distinguish two positions: first, that of explicit support for Russia, and second, that of so-called “active neutrality,” which, while differing in intensity, share an underlying narrative architecture.

The Explicit Support Bloc: Sovereignty as a Selective Framework

In Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, the war was systematically framed within the ideological repertoire of Latin American anti-imperialism, albeit with different emphases that reveal the differing bases of legitimacy of each regime. 

Nicolás Maduro announced “his full backing for President Putin in the defense of peace, of his people, and of his homeland,” framing the invasion as part of a process in which “the American empire and NATO are seeking, by military means, to destroy Russia”. His discourse privileges the concept of multipolarity as a normative horizon, allowing him to present the invasion not as an act of aggression but as a response to an unbalanced world order—a framing consistent with Chavismo’s self-identification as a Global South actor in conflict with the West.

Miguel Díaz-Canel drew on a different but functionally convergent repertoire: that of legitimate security. By arguing that the conflict “could have been avoided had Russia’s security guarantee demands been addressed”, Cuban discourse shifts the moral burden from the aggressor to those supposedly forcing its hand. This framing follows a particular logic, since Havana has historically built its foreign policy on the doctrine of non-intervention and the defense of national sovereignty. In this case, however, it applies these principles asymmetrically, invoking Russian sovereignty against NATO but not Ukrainian sovereignty against Russia—showing that the selection of legal principles is not neutral, but ideologically driven.

Daniel Ortega, in Nicaragua, took the most explicit position of the three by backing Russia’s recognition of the separatist territories of Donetsk and Lugansk, blaming the European Union and the United States for “encircling and threatening Russia” since 2014.

Despite these differences in approach (with Maduro prioritizing the geopolitical framework of multipolarity and Díaz-Canel appealing to the legal framework of collective security), Ortega adopted the purest version of the Russian narrative. This stance is explained, in part, by the fact that Nicaragua lacks the diplomatic capital that Cuba and Venezuela have accumulated in multilateral forums, and therefore has less need to maintain the appearance of an autonomous foreign policy.

Beyond this, all three converge in mobilizing a shared conceptual repertoire (anti-imperialism, multipolarity, selective sovereignty) inherited from long-standing regional political traditions—one flexible enough to absorb and justify a territorial invasion in Eastern Europe.

Soviet Nostalgia as an Ideological Substrate: The Myth of the USSR as Defender

The reach of these repertoires beyond the Bolivarian bloc responds to a historical dimension that structures political perceptions in significant sectors of Latin America and the Caribbean. This is expressed through Soviet nostalgia—that is, the representation of the Soviet Union, and by extension of Russia as its geopolitical successor, as a necessary counterweight to American hegemony.

This representation is not marginal: for decades, the USSR was perceived by sectors of the Latin American left, national liberation movements, and certain intellectual circles as the only actor capable of limiting US intervention in the region. After its dissolution in 1991, that collective memory took the shape of nostalgia, which Moscow has sought to reactivate and strategically instrumentalize ever since.

In this way, the discursive operation Russia deployed to justify the invasion of Ukraine before Latin American audiences deliberately drew on this nostalgia. By presenting its actions as a “defensive response” to NATO’s expansion, Moscow reactivated an already-established narrative scheme: that of a non-Western power resisting the advance of a hegemonic West. Under this logic, Russia symbolically occupies the place the USSR held during the Cold War as a historical counterpower, and the war in Ukraine is reframed not as a territorial aggression but as one more episode in that anti-imperialist resistance. In this sense, the continuity with Cold War vocabulary is not accidental—it is part of Russia’s communication strategy toward the region.

This memory, however, operates with different nuances across the region. In Cuba, where the alliance with the USSR was for decades the regime’s main guarantee of survival, the identification between Russia and the historical role of the Soviet Union carries a particularly intense emotional and institutional charge, since it is not merely a geopolitical analogy but a memory of mutual dependence. In Venezuela and Nicaragua, by contrast, the link is more ideological than historical, invoking the name of the USSR as an image of anti-imperialism that these regimes summon to legitimize their own political trajectories. In countries such as Mexico or Argentina, Soviet nostalgia operates in a more diffuse way, mainly through left-wing intellectual and academic traditions that, during the Cold War, established theoretical or symbolic ties with the socialist world, and which in 2022 tended to process the war through categories inherited from that period.

The greatest strategic value of this idea for Moscow’s purposes is its ability to function without being explicitly stated. Latin American actors do not need to express sympathy for Putin or his political organization; it is enough for them to activate the scheme of a “non-Western power resisting the West” for the Russian narrative to find a receptive framework. Soviet nostalgia thus functions not as a conscious ideology, but as a latent interpretive structure, one that the discourses examined in the previous sections—both those of explicit support and those of active neutrality—activated with varying degrees of deliberateness.

The “Active Neutrality” Bloc: The Mexican and Brazilian Cases

The cases of Mexico and Brazil are analytically richer, precisely because they illustrate how diplomatic traditions with universalist aspirations can, under certain conditions, produce practical effects similar to those of proactive alignment. Both governments presented themselves as neutral or as mediators, but their discourse put into circulation interpretive frameworks of the conflict that coincided in substantive ways with the Russian narrative. In this sense, the difference from the explicit-support bloc lies not in the content of the framing but in its presentation: rather than supporting Russia outright, they criticized the West; rather than justifying the invasion, they equated the two sides’ responsibilities.

In Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador explicitly refused to adopt economic sanctions against Russia, citing the principle of “good relations with all the world’s governments”, framing his position within the Estrada Doctrine and the tradition of non-intervention that has structured Mexican foreign policy since the 1930s. This framing, however, carried an additional ideological dimension that set it apart from mere legalism: legislators from the ruling Morena party formed a “Mexico-Russia Friendship Committee” in Congress, at whose inaugural ceremony the Russian ambassador publicly thanked Mexico for the fact that it “will never join” the sanctions. This overlap between a long-standing diplomatic principle—non-interventio–and gestures of political affinity toward Moscow is what characterizes the Mexican position; not simple pragmatism, but a convergence between legal tradition and ideological affinity. What matters is that this convergence did not require an explicit decision to support Russia—it only took the consistent application of a pre-existing principle to produce an outcome that Moscow was able to exploit.

The case of Lula da Silva in Brazil illustrates an even more complex variant of this dynamic. In April 2023, during a tour of China and the United Arab Emirates, Lula بأن that the United States should stop “encouraging” the war and “start talking about peace,” pointing to Washington and the European Union as actors that were “contributing” to the continuation of the conflict by sending weapons to Ukraine. The international reaction was revealing of the objective nature of the framing used, as the White House spokesperson accused Lula of “parroting Russian and Chinese propaganda,” while Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who was visiting Brasília that same week, thanked Brazil for its “clear understanding of the origins of the situation”. The fact that the same statement drew simultaneous condemnation from the West and praise from Moscow does not mean that Lula acted as an agent of Russian propaganda; what it does allow us to infer is that the interpretive framework he used—equating the responsibility of the aggressor with that of the arms suppliers—was functionally compatible with Russian interests regardless of the intent behind it.

This tension between formal position and practical effect can also be seen in Brazil’s behavior in multilateral forums. Brasília condemned the invasion at the UN, but also voted in favor of an investigation into the attack on the Nord Stream pipeline, and Lula suggested that Ukraine should consider ceding Crimea as part of a negotiation. This pattern—formal condemnation combined with practical equidistance—reflects the tension between two traditions in Brazilian foreign policy: the multilateralism that prevents unconditional alignment, and the aspiration to Global South leadership that seeks to position Brazil above the blocs. It illustrates how pre-existing ideological frameworks, in this case the ambition for strategic autonomy, can generate, without premeditation, framings of the conflict that are more favorable to Russia than the formal UN vote would suggest. Taken together, the discourses of the “active neutrality” bloc share an underlying narrative structure: NATO’s expansion as the cause of the conflict, the West as a co-responsible party, and the pursuit of peace without explicit condemnation as an ethically superior position. This structure was not imported directly from Moscow, but rather activated by countries’ own domestic agendas—yet it turned out to be functionally convergent with Russian interests in multilateral forums. Understanding why these discourses found domestic support and did not generate greater internal political costs requires examining the media ecosystem in which they were produced and circulated.

Disinformation, Propaganda, and the Media Construction of the War

Latin American perceptions of the war in Ukraine were not shaped solely by the diplomatic positions of governments, but were also molded by a media ecosystem in which Russian propaganda, disinformation, and digital ideological polarization operated with notable effectiveness. Analyzing this ecosystem is relevant to the central argument, because it helps us understand the mechanism through which narratives favorable to Russia found an audience beyond official circles, having drawn on pre-existing media infrastructures and already-established cultural predispositions. This section distinguishes two related but separable phenomena: disinformation operations attributable to identifiable pro-Russian actors, and ideological narratives that circulated autonomously, drawing on regional political traditions.

Narratives and Media Operations Linked to Pro-Russian Actors

The first element to consider is the structural advantage Russian media held in the region before the war began. RT en Español was created in 2009, ahead of equivalent European channels such as DW or France 24 in Spanish, which allowed it to build consolidated audiences before its competitors. This first-mover advantage is analytically significant, because it indicates that when the invasion broke out, RT did not have to build audiences from scratch, but simply activate distribution networks that already existed. The contrast with the limited development of European or Ukrainian media in Spanish, which did have to build a presence under urgent conditions, helps explain the informational asymmetry that characterized coverage of the conflict in the region.

An analysis by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab found that the most frequent keyword in RT en Español’s subtitles was “USA,” and that its Facebook content was systematically oriented more toward the United States than toward specific Latin American countries. According to researcher Iria Puyosa, “the common thread running through RT’s communication in the region is the questioning of American imperialism”. This finding is key to understanding the logic of RT’s penetration in the region, since its message is not primarily “pro-Russian” in a positive sense, but rather anti-American. This distinction matters because it considerably broadens the spectrum of potential audiences—for example, in contexts where distrust of Washington cuts across the political spectrum, including progressive sectors, social movements, or critical academic circles, RT’s anti-US framing can prove ideologically legible and appealing regardless of any sympathy for Russia. The war in Ukraine gave RT a new object onto which to project this pre-existing framework, and the Soviet nostalgia described in the previous section provided the historical substrate that made this message culturally recognizable. This mechanism of adoption without explicit coordination can also be observed at the academic level. Researcher Vladimir Rouvinski documents that, in universities and think tanks in Mexico and Argentina, some analysts present interpretive frameworks of the conflict aligned with official Russian discourse as their own perspective, including the use of the term “special military operation” instead of “invasion.” His central observation is that “their narratives change when Moscow’s narratives change”. This phenomenon, documented especially in Mexico and Argentina—two of the countries with the strongest academic traditions of Latin American critical thought—does not necessarily mean these actors are conscious agents of Russian propaganda. It suggests, rather, that the interpretive framework Moscow projects—anti-imperialism, multipolarity—is sufficiently consistent with pre-existing intellectual traditions to be adopted without critical friction, which makes it a more persistent channel of influence than direct propaganda.

An element that further complicates this picture is that disinformation did not require direct Russian state media to circulate effectively. An analysis by the Brookings Institution showed that seven of the fifteen most retweeted accounts in the information ecosystem studied were independent Spanish-language influencers with no formal affiliation to RT or Sputnik. Pro-Russian narrative frameworks had been internalized by autonomous actors to a degree sufficient to be reproduced without explicit coordination with Moscow. Propaganda that can dispense with its own distribution channels is, in a sense, more robust and harder to counter than propaganda that depends on identifiable sources.

The Zelensky Deepfake and AI-Driven Disinformation

The war in Ukraine also marked a turning point in the use of artificial intelligence for wartime disinformation purposes. On March 16, 2022, three weeks after the invasion began, an AI-generated video circulated showing President Zelensky asking his soldiers to lay down their arms. The material was distributed through pro-Russian Telegram channels and was briefly published on the Ukraine 24 website, which reported a cyberattack. Experts described it as the first deepfake “used intentionally and in a widely deceptive manner” in an armed conflict. The analytical significance of this case does not lie in the video’s persuasiveness—it was debunked relatively quickly—but rather in the element of uncertainty it introduced: from that moment on, the possibility that any official image or statement could be fabricated became embedded in public debate, with effects potentially more lasting than the false content itself. A study by University College Cork that analyzed nearly 5,000 tweets about deepfakes during the first seven months of 2022 concluded that they were being used systematically to sustain conspiracy theories and erode trust in mainstream media, an effect that transcends the content of any single piece and affects overall trust in information.

In Latin America, this type of content found favorable conditions for reception wherever the official framing of the conflict already produced ambiguity. The ATAFIMI project documented that two AI-generated TikTok videos, both concerning Ukrainian conscripts, surpassed three million views in Mexico without any platform warning labels. The fact that Mexico is the case with the greatest documented reach in the region is no minor detail, since it is one of the countries where the government’s position already produced an equidistant framing of the conflict. This suggests a synergy between official political discourse and the disinformation ecosystem: in contexts where the government does not identify a clear aggressor, content that humanizes or discredits the Ukrainian military encounters less cultural resistance and less willingness toward critical scrutiny among audiences.

Adding to this picture was the migration of disinformation to messaging platforms following European sanctions on RT and Sputnik. A network of Telegram channels distributed nearly 84,000 messages in Spanish that mixed false content with real news. This deliberate blending tactic is analytically significant, because it turns disinformation into a matter of cost: readers who want to distinguish true from false must invest more time and critical capacity in each piece of content, which the specialized literature calls “fact fatigue,” leading many users to opt for the narrative that best fits their prior predispositions. This mechanism systematically favors already-established interpretive frameworks, among which Latin American anti-imperialism holds a central place. In addition, a study published in the journal ICONO 14 تأكيد الهجوم الصاروخي على المدينة that the most widely used strategy during the first months of the conflict was false context—real images recontextualized with misleading descriptions—with a peak in production during the first two weeks of the invasion.

Anti-NATO Narratives and Digital Ideological Polarization

Alongside disinformation based on fabricated facts or recontextualized images, Latin American perceptions of the conflict were shaped by interpretive frameworks that oversimplified the war’s geopolitical context. The most widespread of these is the anti-NATO narrative, which attributes the cause of the conflict exclusively to Western expansion eastward into Europe. Unlike factual disinformation, this type of narrative does not operate through invented facts but through causal simplification: it takes a real and legitimate debate within the international relations literature—the role of NATO’s expansion in Europe’s security architecture—and turns it into the sole explanation for the conflict, sidelining other variables such as Ukrainian sovereignty as an autonomous factor, Russia’s history of aggression prior to 2022 (from Chechnya and Georgia to the annexation of Crimea in 2014), and the legal obligations arising from international law. The result is a causal structure that transforms a territorial invasion into a symmetrical geopolitical dispute in which both sides bear equal responsibility. That this narrative found greater traction in Latin America than in other regions is not surprising, considering that it draws on the same ideological substrate as Soviet nostalgia—namely, the representation of the West, and of NATO as its military arm, as a structural threat rather than as a guarantee of collective security. According to the Reuters Institute, the war “created fertile ground for the spread of these narratives” in the Spanish-speaking world. Julio Montes, co-founder of Maldita.es, describes the mechanism precisely: “the consumer of RT or Sputnik is already a consumer who has come in and consumes that content because they have already been persuaded of certain narratives”. Pro-Russian disinformation did not create the ideological predispositions of its Latin American audiences—it exploited them. Historical regional anti-imperialism, distrust of NATO as an instrument of Washington, and the memory of the Soviet role as a counterweight were the substrate on which Russian narratives found fertile ground. What the Ukraine conflict did was update and reactivate that substrate, not build it from nothing.

The contrast with Uruguay’s response helps verify this argument by way of counterexample. Uruguay was the only country in the region that actively worked to counter disinformation about the war, through public communication mechanisms that explicitly distinguished the government’s position from pro-Russian narratives. That Uruguay was the exception is no coincidence, largely because it is the country with the weakest tradition of anti-imperialism as a domestic political culture, with the greatest ideological distance from the Bolivarian bloc, and without the memory of Soviet dependency that characterizes Cuba. This contrast suggests that the institutional passivity of other countries toward disinformation was not simply negligence, but was shaped by the same ideological frameworks that facilitated the penetration of pro-Russian narratives in the first place.

The combined result of political discourses, pro-Russian media infrastructure, and digital ideological polarization was the construction of a perception of the conflict in which the invasion was frequently framed as just another episode in a dispute between great powers, with responsibilities portrayed as symmetrical or even reversed relative to those established under international law. This construction was not identical or equally intense across all countries, but it did shape the space of what was politically possible for governments in the region within the multilateral forums examined in the previous section—the absence of explicit condemnation proved less domestically costly in contexts where the dominant public narrative did not identify a clear aggressor.

It is precisely in light of this powerful propaganda machinery sustained by the Kremlin that it becomes necessary to examine what the material and institutional reality of Putin’s regime actually is.

Present-Day Russia and the USSR: From Apparent Continuity to Structural Rupture

Within contemporary political debate, a tendency has taken hold—especially visible in certain sectors of the left—to equate today’s Russian Federation with the Soviet Union. This equivalence tends to rest on two elements: territorial inheritance and the idea of a historical-political continuity between the two states.

This analysis focuses on three dimensions in this regard: political doctrine, the role of religion, and the economic model. Together, these clearly show that Putin’s Russia does not extend the Soviet project, but rather reconfigures it along a post-Soviet, nationalist-conservative, and authoritarian-capitalist logic.

From Revolutionary Universalism to Putinism

A decisive rupture is found in the very nature of the political project. The Soviet Union justified its existence through a Marxist-Leninist ideology with universal aspirations, by definition internationalist and oriented toward a global historical transformation. Its legitimacy rested on the promise of abolishing social classes, overcoming capitalism, and expanding socialism beyond its borders. Although Soviet practice was full of contradictions, its language of legitimation still pointed to a universalist horizon: history was leading toward a higher order, one that the USSR, through socialism, aspired to bring to humanity.

Contemporary Russia, by contrast, is not organized around a universal emancipatory promise, but around a conservative national-state logic. Kremlin discourse has increasingly shifted toward the idea of Russia as a “civilization-state,” a particular historical community that must defend its sovereignty, its cultural uniqueness, and its sphere of influence against the West. Within this framework, categories such as the Russkiy mir, or “Russian world,” serve a function of symbolic and geopolitical cohesion: they do not call for world revolution, but for the preservation of an expanded—and supposedly threatened—national identity.

This shift is crucial because it changes the type of political subject the regime seeks to mobilize. The USSR spoke in the name of class and of humanity’s historical future; Putin’s Russia speaks in the name of the nation, tradition, and the survival of its own order. This is not a mere change in rhetoric, but a shift in the very form of power’s legitimacy. In this sense, Putinism does not seek to abolish the existing order to build a new universal one; rather, it seeks to restore authority, discipline, and hierarchy in the name of sovereignty and of a historical continuity selectively constructed by the Kremlin.

The Use of Faith as Legitimation

Another structural break appears in the place occupied by religion. For much of its trajectory, the USSR defined itself as an officially atheist state, and waged systematic campaigns against religious institutions, ecclesiastical hierarchies, and the public influence of faith. This policy was not merely a cultural trait of the regime, but part of a broader project of subordinating all symbolic authority to the socialist state. Soviet atheism sought to build a secular modernity in which religion would cease to compete with the party as a source of meaning, truth, and legitimacy.

Present-day Russia operates in the opposite direction. The Russian Orthodox Church has been reincorporated into the core of national identity and plays a significant role in legitimizing political power. More than a purely religious actor, it functions as moral and ideological support for the regime, helping translate state authority into terms of tradition, historical continuity, and shared “traditional” values. In this way, religion no longer appears as a force to be eradicated, but becomes a useful resource for cohering society, disciplining behavior, and promoting conservatism by differentiating Russia from a West portrayed as decadent or morally corrupt.

The political significance of this shift should not be underestimated. In the USSR, religion was seen as an obstacle to building the new order. Today, religion operates as a tool for sacralizing the political order. Where the Soviet project sought to replace faith with socialist rationality, the current regime reintroduces it as a mechanism of legitimation and moral cohesion within public discourse. The difference is not one of degree, but of historical meaning.

From a Centralized Economy to Oligarchic Capitalism

The economic difference is decisive. The Soviet system rested on the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, centralized planning, and state control over prices, wages, industrial output, and the distribution of goods. That model was not oriented toward maximizing private profitability, but toward organizing the economy around political objectives set by the state, with bureaucratic centralization being a constitutive feature of the Soviet system. Present-day Russia, by contrast, operates within a capitalist market structure, albeit one heavily shaped by political power and forms of state intervention in strategic sectors. Private property is central, capital accumulation follows profit-driven logics, and the weight of business groups is decisive. However, what distinguishes the current regime is that this accumulation does not take place in a fully autonomous market, but in an environment where access to power, political loyalty, and presidential protection are fundamental structural factors. This is why the terms oligarchic capitalism or patrimonial capitalism are frequently used, rather than simple free-market capitalism.

Strategic sectors such as energy, infrastructure, or the defense industry remain under strong state control, but this control is not equivalent to socialist planning. Rather, it expresses a combination of political authority, rent extraction, and the subordination of key economic actors. As a result, Russia’s economic structure does not extend the Soviet experience—it replaces it with an authoritarian capitalist order marked by strong wealth concentration and a high degree of dependence on political power.

Taken together, these three transformations clearly show that the contemporary Russian Federation is a capitalist, nationalist, and conservative state, with authoritarian traits and an instrumental use of religion and geopolitical power. Although it retains certain symbolic references to the Soviet past, its political doctrine, institutional structure, and economic model bear no resemblance whatsoever to the USSR’s socialist project. Precisely for this reason, the relevant question is not whether the two regimes are equivalent, but why certain actors continue to interpret them, to a greater or lesser extent, as if they were.

Why Do We Talk About Continuity? An Approach to Interpretive Frameworks on the Left

As has been argued throughout this article, Latin America and the Caribbean do not have “the left” as a uniform bloc, but rather multiple traditions, sensibilities, and interpretive repertoires that can only approximately be grouped under that label. In this sense, the equation between Putin’s capitalist, conservative Russia and the defunct Soviet Union rarely appears explicitly stated in official documents from left-wing sectors. Instead, it survives as a set of shared historical frameworks operating at the social level, present in electoral political culture, grassroots activism, sympathetic opinion spaces, and, occasionally, in the rhetoric of certain leaderships.

On this premise, at least four interpretive currents can be identified that help explain why part of the political spectrum continues to view Russia through a Soviet lens. These are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, they tend to coexist and reinforce one another within the same coalitions, combined according to circumstance and each actor’s position toward the United States, the Cold War, or contemporary geopolitical disputes.

1. Soviet nostalgia.
2. Russia as geopolitical heir.
3. Pro-Russian anti-imperialism.
4. Direct identification.
   
   

Soviet Nostalgia

This can be understood as a deep emotional, ideological, and historical bond with the Soviet Union. Its weight is explained by the fact that, for broad sectors of the left (those who lived through the Cold War or were politically formed under its narrative), the USSR represents an indelible symbol of the socialist ideal, of logistical support for liberation movements, and of the financing of revolutions and political processes in the region. Soviet memory, therefore, is not exhausted by nostalgia for a vanished state, but condenses an image of power, discipline, and historical possibility.

This nostalgia is intentionally fed by the Kremlin’s own communications apparatus. By strategically deploying Soviet aesthetics—such as the display of red flags with the hammer and sickle at Victory Day parades or the exaltation of the “Great Patriotic War”—the Russian government appeals to the affective memory of the international left. For example, in 2024, Victory Day functioned as a politically charged symbolic event.  Through it, the Kremlin not only commemorated the defeat of Nazism in 1945, but also sought to connect that Soviet victory with Putin’s Russia and with the war in Ukraine.

For these sectors, support for Russia is not always an endorsement of its current oligarchic economic model, but rather an act of historical loyalty toward the power that was key to their struggles.

Russia as Geopolitical Heir

This position is more pragmatic. It recognizes that Russia is no longer socialist, but validates it as heir to Soviet geopolitical weight. It stems from the fact that the USSR was, for decades, a real counterweight to American hegemony, and that after its collapse in the 1990s, a unipolar order took hold. Within this framework, Russia’s resurgence opened up, for certain political sectors, the possibility of envisioning a new multipolar order, in which Russia’s military capacity, its veto power at the UN, and its willingness to challenge the Western security architecture carry weight.

In this sense, Putin’s conservative domestic policies fade into the background compared to Moscow’s strategic usefulness as a counterweight or check on the United States (or the West) and its allies. This logic is evident when considering the relationship between Russia and certain Latin American governments seeking to counter US pressure. In this regard, Cuba and Venezuela have maintained ties with Moscow not out of ideological affinity with Putinism, but because of its capacity to offer energy, military, and diplomatic support in contexts of isolation or sanctions. As a concrete example, in November 2024, Russia and Venezuela signed cooperation agreements on security and energy, reinforcing a relationship defined less by socialism than by the need for survival in the current geopolitical environment. 

Pro-Russian Anti-Imperialism

Within this interpretive framework, the world is divided in binary terms between the forces of Western imperialism (the United States, the European Union, and NATO) and those who resist it. This reactive logic conditions support for the Russian Federation as support given out of opposition, not out of positive endorsement of its social or political model. Russia is defended and assimilated into the imagery of resistance once embodied by the USSR simply because it faces the same adversaries, even though it does so from a different historical position and with a completely different state structure. This stance helps explain a recurring paradox: certain left-wing movements, by reading international politics almost exclusively through the lens of confrontation with the United States, end up justifying or minimizing Kremlin practices that they would otherwise denounce without hesitation. Thus, the repression of sexual minorities, restrictions on dissent, the tightening of control over public life, and the consolidation of an official moral conservatism are relativized or directly subordinated to the geopolitical priority of confronting the West. The problem is not only ethical but also analytical: when every Kremlin action is interpreted as a legitimate response to Western power, the ability to distinguish between anti-hegemonic resistance and internal authoritarianism disappears. Within this same logic, extractivism, the militarized centralization of the economy, and the subordination of society to state power fade into the background. Anti-imperialism, in this way, ceases to function as a critique of power and becomes a grammar of alignment that produces a form of selective blindness.

This logic allows pro-Russian anti-imperialism to continue to find in Moscow a figure of resistance, even though the actual content of the Russian regime is capitalist, nationalist, and authoritarian, and bears no substantive relation to the Soviet project.

Direct Identification

This minority view identifies and understands contemporary Russia as being the very same USSR—not as its equivalent or successor, but as an almost literal continuity. This category is not usually present within governing coalitions of the modern left, but is instead concentrated in sectors of more orthodox and heavily ideologized communist militancy. There, history seems to be read through frozen Cold War categories, producing a mimicry between contemporary actors and those of the 20th century.

Within this reading, the Kremlin’s confrontation with the West is interpreted as a continuation of the class struggle or of Soviet international expansion. Even narratives such as the supposed “denazification” of Ukraine are presented as analogous to the 1945 victory, erasing the differences between the historical anti-fascist war and present-day Russian foreign policy. For these sectors, any criticism of Moscow is automatically dismissed as pro-imperialist propaganda, without engaging with the underlying capitalist and imperial nature of the Russian state itself today.

The problem with this identification is not only analytical but also political. By superimposing Russia onto the USSR, the mutation of the Russian regime is completely erased. Rather than reading the present, a closed historical framework is projected onto it.

Memory and Pragmatism

In light of the above, it is interesting to note how contemporary Russia is able to draw on all these interpretations to its advantage simultaneously. The reason is not that Moscow remains Soviet, but that its politics of symbols, its confrontation with the West, and its selective reuse of historical memory allow it to move between different interpretive frameworks without being confined to any single one.

In countries such as Cuba or Venezuela, these categories intertwine in complex ways. While government leaderships operate under the pragmatics of pro-Russian anti-imperialism and geopolitical continuity—signing oil or military agreements to survive American isolation—grassroots militants and the state communications apparatus often draw on Soviet nostalgia or even direct identification to lend these transactional alliances an epic, revolutionary sheen. It is at this intersection between geopolitical necessity and historical memory that the mirage of continuity survives.

الخلاصة

The analysis of historical background, diplomatic forums, and media narratives presented in this article demonstrates that Latin America’s response to the war in Ukraine is neither an accident nor a simple pragmatic reaction. On the contrary, the conflict has functioned as a catalyst that exposes the deep roots of the region’s political culture. The way Latin America decodes the contemporary international scene is shaped and determined by the memories of the 20th century: foreign interventions, economic asymmetry, and support for dictatorships. This history built a structural distrust of Western powers that, to this day, continues to act as an essential axis within public debate and the conduct of foreign policy.

Understanding this historical foundation is key to explaining why the region did not act as a unified bloc in response to the invasion. In its attempt to balance respect for international law with its own strategic interests, Latin American states displayed profound fragmentation. The spectrum ranges from support for authoritarian regimes that see in Moscow a political and material lifeline, to the diplomatic condemnation of countries seeking to protect their economies by avoiding sanctions. A particularly interesting point is the “active neutrality” stance adopted by powers such as Brazil or Mexico. Although it stems from a legitimate effort to maintain autonomy and avoid subordination to the agendas of the North, in practice this doctrine of non-intervention ends up producing an asymmetric equivalence that dilutes the responsibilities between the aggressor state and the invaded state.

It is precisely on this pre-existing discursive foundation that the Russian media and diplomatic ecosystem managed to operate with great effectiveness. The success of disinformation and of platforms such as RT or Sputnik in the region did not consist of creating sympathy for Russia from scratch. Their real skill lay in instrumentalizing classic Latin American anti-imperialism. By focusing the origin of the war almost exclusively on NATO’s expansion and the role of the West, the Kremlin’s official narrative fit perfectly into interpretive schemes already established among local political sectors. In doing so, they managed to transform an invasion that violates the most basic principles of territorial sovereignty into a geopolitical narrative in which Russia assumes, in distorted fashion, the historical role of a defensive power, or one opposed to American hegemonism.

This narrative framework reveals the greatest analytical and ideological contradiction exposed in this article: the paradox running through various sectors of the Latin American left. As detailed in the demystification of Putinism’s political doctrine, the tendency to view the contemporary Russian Federation through the lens of the extinct Soviet Union rests on no material or institutional affinity whatsoever. It is based, rather, on emotional loyalties frozen in time and on a utilitarian use of historical memory. By establishing opposition to the United States as the sole absolute measure of geopolitical validity, part of Latin American anti-imperialism loses its analytical focus and becomes a reactive stance that omits crucial elements from its field of vision.

Under this binary reading of the world, the real characteristics of the current Russian state remain a blind spot. It obscures the fact that this is a regime grounded in oligarchic capitalism, of a nationalist-conservative and strongly authoritarian character—elements that represent a total break from the ideals of redistribution and equality of the socialist project. The problem with reading the present using only Cold War categories is that it eliminates the capacity to distinguish: it conflates what could be a necessary and critical stance toward the asymmetries of the Western order with the validation of an expansionist imperial project driven by another global power.

Ultimately, Latin America’s perceptions of Russian aggression against Ukraine show that the region continues to process 21st-century conflicts through the maps of the last century. The interest in maintaining an independent margin of maneuver, and in not automatically aligning with the dictates of the West, remains a vital pillar of the Latin American diplomatic tradition. However, the contemporary challenge left by this crisis is to make that defense of sovereignty consistent across all fronts. The goal is not to renounce critical thinking toward traditional centers of power, but to ensure that the desire for autonomy does not turn into a rhetorical argument that, whether out of historical affinity or rejection of the United States, ends up tolerating the transgressions of new actors on the global stage.

إن الآراء والأفكار والمواقف المعبر عنها في الأوراق المنشورة على هذا الموقع تخص المؤلفين وحدهم، ولا تعكس بالضرورة آراء مركز الحوار عبر الأطلسي أو لجانه أو منظماته التابعة. وتهدف هذه الأوراق إلى تحفيز الحوار والنقاش، ولا تمثل مواقف سياسية رسمية لمركز الحوار عبر الأطلسي أو لأي منظمات أخرى قد يكون المؤلفون مرتبطين بها.