It’s not saying it’s bad to be anti-war, it’s saying that it’s a naive position in this case - a simple “anti-war-ism” as opposed to the more complicated “fully understands the core of modern geopolitics”. “Anti-war-ism” is still placed exactly opposite social darwinism, but is adjacent to both “fully understands geopolitics” and “dogs of US empire”.
No one believes that Russia is a moral actor in this, just that they’re acting rationally in the face of a threat. In fact, Russia should be the weakest link in the anti-imperial camp. The Russian Federation would have been perfectly happy to join NATO and assist with the oppression of the third world, but for one reason or another, NATO wasn’t interested - my personal theory is that Russia would have provided too much of a counterbalance to the US within NATO, potentially making NATO dangerously independent. Thus, Russia remained a designated enemy even after it liberalized. But, the specific reason isn’t the main point, the main point is that Russia has been forced by circumstance into the anti-imperial camp, while Ukraine has chosen to be a tool of the imperial camp. It’s as simple as that, and you can be as anti-campist as you want, but there are objectively two camps, and no unaligned alternative. If you asked any Ukrainian nationalist, they would agree that they are with the west against the oriental hordes.
Ukraine was the culmination of a process of bringing former eastern bloc states into NATO in order to surround and weaken Russia. Russia understood this, and had Ukraine as a red line. From the Russian point of view, a Ukraine allied with the west would be a hostile state placed at the furthest southern line of advance of Operation Barbarossa in 1941. That is to say, any potential attack on Russia by NATO would begin where the Germans stalled out (at least on the northern and southern fronts), and thus have a much greater chance of reaching Moscow. Or, a bit more realistically, NATO missiles and aircraft could be based much closer to the Russian heartland than before. You can argue that their assessment would be wrong, but that only makes sense if you trust NATO over Russia, where even a neutral position (i.e. don’t trust Russia or NATO) would hold that Russia’s concerns are valid.
Even then, Russia didn’t immediately invade Ukraine after the 2014 coup (Maidan wasn’t a revolution, it was just a seizure of power by right wing nationalists). Yes, they seized Crimea and supported the eastern separatists, but they didn’t fully commit until it was completely clear that no diplomatic solution was forthcoming. For the Ukrainian side, Zelensky had been elected as the peace candidate - people wanted the civil war to end, and that’s what he campaigned on. He ended up being too weak to stop the nationalist militias from fighting, so the war continued, and with a diplomatic solution dead in the water, Russia took their shot.
In short, Ukraine allowed itself to be instrumentalized by the west as a weapon against Russia. Ukraine placed itself in the imperialist camp, and this forced Russia solidly into the anti-imperial camp. To support Ukraine is to support a victory for imperialism. Thus, to support both Palestine and Ukraine is to support the empire being weakened in one region and strengthened in another - it’s a geopolitically incoherent position because it comes from a geopolitically naive read of the overall situation.
Eh, some people go a little too far with things