Tankiejerk

This is why I don’t think MLs can form effective long-term coalition

Material reality shows the exact opposite. Leninist-adjacent socialist experiments are the only ones to survive decades on a big scale, even if they still have (or had) faults, or needed adjustment over the years. You can't have perfect from the get go, and these move slowly at a generational pace.

garner support so that he could seize power

You said it all but we don't need hindsight to see its transparent, its exactly the stated intention behind a vanguard party. Without it you can't really seize power in large country-wide scale, simply because success is very rare without it. Even the current liberation movements in Africa are seemingly led by vanguard groups, even if they turn out not to be marxist.

You can talk about the practical implications and how we can take advantage of tragedies without pretending that Russia is a force for good.

Thats exactly what I did. We cannot stop this war, period. But we can understand how it can help us. By burgeoise infighting I mean two capitalist states commanded by two different sets of competing oligarchs, of course. This was predicted by Marx, and happened many times before.

I don’t think the numbers here are clear enough to claim positive Utility from this trade-off

Key word here is probably. Also this is not a trade-off, kicking out imperialism is always good. Every single anti imperialist movement paves the way for them to start actually fixing things unimpeded. That of course depends on what they will do next, liberation from imperial powers is just the first (albeit not any less important) step. There is a reason anti-imperialism takes the forefront in the third world when it comes to this. But you can't just say being under the boot of a brutal foreign power is any better.

BRICS

Read above about imperialism because it applies here. BRICS would not be allowed to advance as much as its doing now if the US still had a tight grip on us. You can take quite a lot of their military and political interventions around the world as an example. Every country in the past (that i know of, at least) had their shit beaten out of them for even trying to have wiggle room outside of the absurd demands of the imperial burgeoise and the IMF.

My own country was trying something similar before it was couped by the US and my own country was almost couped recently with their help, again, because we are slipping from their control just slightly. BRICS is one such motivator, if not one of the main ones.

You seem to have a very imperial core-centric view of the world, like most non-leninist leftists tend to do nowadays, moreso the ones from the imperial core. Things are not black and white, and every little victory helps when we barely have any space to move.