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If you betray one anti-imperialist struggle for the sake of another you are by definition an opportunist.

Also, i just don't believe that he is engaging in this elaborate strategic deception act that you say he is. If it was just about fear of censorship he could just shut up about it and not say anything. Or he could stream on YouTube, which so far is less censorious than Twitch. Instead he goes out of his way to virtue signal about how bad he thinks Putin and Russia are and how Ukraine are just these innocent smol-beans defending themselves. You are not a pipeline when you are actively lying to your audience, hiding the truth about the Donbass genocide, and demonizing those who are fighting against fascism and imperialism.

What is the difference between him saying that NATO is not good but Russia is still bad for invading and the liberals who will say that the genocide in Gaza is bad but you should still condemn October 7? How hard would it be for him to invite someone on his show who lives in the Donbass and could actually educate him and his audience about life under Ukrainian fascism and Ukrainian bombs?

And speaking of Palestine, yes, he is one of the bigger pro-Palestinian voices in the online commentariat. Great. But it is now acceptable within liberal circles to be pro-Palestine. Pro-Palestine sentiment is increasingly mainstream. We have won that narrative battle decisively among the young generations that are likely to be his viewer demographic. But you know what is still incredibly unpopular? Telling the truth about Ukraine. That is all the more reason to use your platform to do it, when no one else with your reach will.

Instead he chooses what is easy, and convenient for his bank account: respectability politics and trying to ingratiate himself with the liberal mainstream, which is a demonstrably failed strategy. It has been tried over and over again and never worked. Yet he still carries water for Democrats and their electoral politics, still simping for the so-called "progressives" who will vote every time in lockstep with the bipartisan warmongers to give weapons and money to Ukrainian Nazis.

It's time you stopped making excuses and inventing elaborate theories about him hiding his power level and just admit that he is a liberal.

If todays Russia had the global position to do so, they would create their own version of Nato and it would be just as imperialist as Nato is

"If Russia's historical and material conditions were different, it would be different."

If todays Russia had the global position to do so, they would create their own version of Nato and it would be just as imperialist as Nato is.

so making things up counts as analysis now?

It doesn't matter what they would do, we can speculate all day about intentions and alternate universes. All that matters is what they are doing right now in the real world that we live in. Russia is allied with China, Iran, the DPRK, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Mali, Burkina Faso, etc. All targets of US imperialism. They support and are supported by all socialist or socialist adjacent countries.

The fact is that at the moment Russia is one of the biggest anti-imperialist forces in the world, and certainly the one doing most of the heavy lifting in terms of actually militarily taking on the imperialists and their proxies. They are militarily supporting anti-imperialist governments all over the world. They are killing more fascists each day than anyone else on the planet. And they are second only to China in their contribution to upending US hegemony.

If February 2022 didn't happen we would be living in a very different world today, one in which US imperialism would still be in a much stronger position. The SMO has been and continues to be, objectively, a historic game changer and immensely positive contribution to the global anti-imperialist cause. Vladimir Putin's personal ideological inclinations don't change these factual realities. He has no choice but to act according to the geopolitical circumstances that Russia finds itself in.

If it were about liberating the ethnic Russians oppressed by Ukraine they would not be so happy with a slow churning meat grinder approach, they would do what the west does and destroy country-wide infrastructural.

The slow approach is precisely because they want to avoid damaging large swathes of the country and causing massive civilian casualties. This way the damage remains relatively restricted to the area around the line of contact, and the casualties are overwhelmingly military. This conflict has one of the lowest civilian to military casualties in any modern conflict. I won't even compare it to Gaza because that is not a war, it's a genocide, but even something like the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, the Syrian civil war, the Vietnam war, the Korean war, etc. all had way, way higher ratios of civilian casualties.

If they went all out in the way you suggest that would be a sure recipe for turning the population of Ukraine against Russia more efficiently than a decade of the anti-Russian Banderite propaganda has done. Ukraine right now is struggling with a huge desertion problem and a lack of volunteers so serious that they are having to resort to insanely abusive forced mobilization practices. If Russia launched a campaign against the civilian infrastructure all they would be doing is motivating millions more Ukrainians to fight, and that would prolong the conflict far more than the current careful and methodical approach.

At the end of this Russia doesn't want to have a destroyed country full of radicalized Russia hating people on their border. They want to have a friendly or at least neutral, semi-functional, stable country whose population has grown disillusioned with the entire Banderite project. Meanwhile on the front they continue to eliminates the most radicalized and fanatic ones who can't be turned.

Russia is still a capitalist country that uses its military for its own interests, not anti-fascism

Both can be true.