elections in Russia, specifically the State Duma Elections of 2021 are illegitimate, and criticized Alexei Navalny's Smart Voting strategy as pointless, and “unable to amount to anything”. Though they did not officially announce a boycott of the election, Autonomous Action stated that by voting in them, one acknowledges the legitimacy of the existing system and thus, subsequently promotes it. Views on the war in Donbas Autonomous Action's Moscow branch officially stated that it recognizes the conflict in Ukraine as a war between fascist groups backed by capitalist nations. The group's membership generally agrees with other anti-war leftist rhetoric, stating that both state actors (and the subsequent governments) are prolonging this war for their benefit; Putin using a neighboring conflict within the former Soviet Union to distract the Russian people from the ongoing domestic financial crisis while Poroshenko weaponized the conflict to flame nationalist sentiment and legitimize his own government after the 2014 Maidan Revolution. The group has concluded that the ultimate goal of the perpetuation of the war in Donbas is to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, securing Russia's southern European flank from military aggression. The group believes that organizations using “anti-fascist” as а “simple label, which does not have anything to do with the reality”, and that there exists no genuine anti-capitalist resistance in the conflict, on either side. Views on international movements Autonomous Action praises the PKK and Kurdish militias that fought off the Islamic State, as well as the Zapatista's in Mexico, though many members of the group remain weary of possible nationalistic sentiment within these resistance movements clouding anarchist thought. In regards to the Kurdish national movement, Autonomous Action has stated that it is not overall anarchist, with only some of its members advocating for a stateless society. Though most of Ocalan's (key founder of Kurdish resistance in Turkey) supporters adhere to the concept of a democratic secular state, and the legal wing of the PKK, the Kurdish HDP party participating in Turkish parliamentary elections, Autonomous Action believes that the Kurdish national movement has a great future ahead of them. The group further recognizes the many libertarian elements of the Kurdish movement (confederalism, cooperatives, direct municipal democracy) and suggests that such elements can become a platform for the further development of libertarian socialist thought and anarchist ideas (if the anarchists in the movement decide to do so). Split In August 2013, at the XII Congress of