People want change in society but they want to see it done peacefully, and I think the No Kings protests were evidence of that
But the history of mass, peaceful protest in the west leading nowhere is endless. In the very US you had the occupy wall street movement. In Spain we had the 15-M protests, in France the Gilets Jeunes, in Greece they had massive protests too, literal millions on the streets… and nothing happened. And I’m only talking about the past 15 years or so. You could go back further to see the tens of millions of people all over the west who protested against the Iraq invasion to no avail, if you go just a few years further back.
The problem isn’t that nobody over the past 50 years of the western world has come up with a clear enough slogan, the problem is that quite literally every institution in the west is designed around maintaining the status quo, and when the time comes they won’t be afraid to use violence to maintain it. If you somehow get a big enough following of peaceful protesters/voters who want to tax the rich, the rich will respond with violence, as it happened for example in my home country Spain in 1936 when the fascists did a coup to a relatively non-revolutionary leftist government.
The list of countries where fascists or otherwise violence were summoned to stop otherwise peaceful social leftist movements is endless: you have Nazi Germany (born after the murder of Rosa Luxembourg by the socialdemocrats), Fascist Spain, Allende being murdered in Chile and Pinochet taking control, you have Iran under Mosaddegh being toppled in the 50s… The list goes on and on and on and on all over the world. The countries which actually managed to reduce wealth inequality aren’t mainly Socialdemocrats ones: you have the Soviet Union, Cuba or Maoist China solving wealth inequality for about a billion people, saving hundreds of millions of lives from hunger and exploitation in the process. There are a few counter-example mini-states such as Finland or Norway but they’re a minority, and historically the reason why they managed to achieve these victories was because of the example (and threat) of the Soviet Union.
Again: I fundamentally agree that the richest among the top 1% must be extremely taxed (ideally their capital expropriated and nationalised or redistributed), but I don’t think that’s happening unless under threat of socialism or directly under socialism. You make a valid point when you say “Full blown revolution is relatively unlikely to occur, or I think we would have seen it by now”, but in my opinion that’s just because the west has been happily exploiting the work and resources of the global south. This dynamic is coming to a halt thanks to China and to the multipolarity of the world, and in the process, the west will collectively lose a lot (as it already happened in Europe and will keep happening, purchase power in Spain as of 2023 was 10 less than in 2006). With the decrease of material wealth in the west, fascism will pop up to keep the profits of the ultra-rich at the expense of the working class, and only socialism can defeat fascism.
Oh boy this is gonna be a spicy comment section.
Essentially, the point is that Russia has no choice. The western empire has expanded eastwards and aims to control increasingly the former “Russian sphere of influence”, which used to be the eastern block for the most part. The west can do this because it has the economic and geopolitical supremacy, and can do this through so-called"soft" power, political power and economic power.
This process progressively weakens the Russian empire in favour of the western empire. This leads to a stronger western empire over time, and this is something patently bad for the entire global south and all nations suffering under the yoke of western imperialism. Fighting against the western imperialism, even by means of military struggle, is considered positive by many socialists, even if done by a reactionary nationalist force. For example Mao famously allied with the Kuomintang during the Japanese invasion, because the priority was the elimination of imperialism, followed by the revolution. Edit: this is to me the epitome of critical support: having good analysis that lets you fight side by side with an anti-imperialist force, but after dealing with imperialism being able to fight the reactionaries and win.
Furthermore, history didn’t begin in 2022. Tens of millions of Ukrainians have suffered the oppression of the west since 1990, becoming the poorest country in Europe and losing millions of lives to poverty, malnutrition, stress, unemployment, alcoholism and suicide since then. If you’re concerned about the wellbeing of Ukrainians, you should primarily be concerned with the western role in the fucking up of the entire country over the past 35 years, which arguably affected it much greater than the ongoing invasion.