Capitalist roaders are real. Dengist approaches can work but the only way they do is with a committed socialist core to push back at the sanctioned bourgeois influence.
Luckily Xi’s faction has begun the process of reigning in capital and promoting SOEs and worker co-ops, just at a pace that is frustrating for many.
A thought experiment: how do you think the US would react if China couped Mexico and supported a prolonged civil war near its border with Texas?
The reality and history is even starker in Ukraine, where fueling the civil war meant ethnic cleansing of ethnic Russians by funding fascists and those adjascent to them. Also, it should be mentioned, significant fossil fuel resources were recently discovered in the area.
Consider how the US has responded to much less proximal and extreme situations and still gets rationalized as the leader of the democratic “free world”.
A final thought: sure, Russia is imperialist, as in how Lenin approached the term, but the difference in degree compared to US-centered global capital makes it have a qualitatively different position. The driving factors here do not make this simply imperialist vs. imperialist. A better (simplistic) phrasing would be imperialist vs. regional capitalist that undermines a unipolar world order, with the latter in a much weaker and comparatively defensive position.
And as always, no war but the class war. The common people of Ukraine are the primary victims of this war and the people in peripheral countries forced into precarity by the sanctions are a close second.
I famously predicted a tendency towards monopoly as a means by which to increase both the rate and mass of profit.