Ok, so, here's the short of it. Mb, I feel it ruins things to speak of it explicitly. It's almost as if you're ruining the process by speaking of it in a plain fashion.

There was a man named Hegel who was integral to the formation of communism, by Marx. You probably know the second bit about Marx. You probably know of Marx and communism and then USSR, Lenin, etc.

Lenin is very well versed in the ideology of Hegel. It's kinda necessary considering the whole leninism schtick. In any case, Putin very much is versed in the Hegelian dialectic and the ideology as well.

Now, the thing is, communism and the whole Marxist/Hegelianistic worldview are vastly unknown what with the whole communism scare. Seemingly though, their theories on the progression of societies is very nuanced and seemingly disregarded. They have the idea that civilization must enter distinct rungs. At each rung there is a thesis core to its existence in that rung and it must solve for an antithesis, an idea dichotomous to the existence of the rung. They inevitably clash and then there is synthesis. This advances them to a new rung where it is the new thesis. The end goal is democracy.

The gist of it is that democracy is not something which is deserved by anybody. Democracy is a high level rung because it is predicated on a system already being pretty developed. After all, we say democracy meeds people to be properly educated and empathetic. The idea they had was that Democracy is something that is plainly only desired by those who've progressed through the rungs because it solves for a problem central to democratic republics which come about in response to republics, etc.

Putin is likely to be somebody well versed in this philosophy of being. He, after all, did mention that his country wasnt developed enough. He mentioned he had to be a strong leader for the time being.

Now, what this has to do with the beginning of this all is democracy is something which can be undeserved. Democracy can be really bad and abused by foreign powers as it provides a weakness that can be leveraged upon. It's a really difficult subject to prove. That's why Putin has spent so much time obfuscating the reality. He has 75 trillion dollars worth of opportunities to disrupt foreign governments and usurp territory in the chaos.

I would hope that you would choose to read up on the ideological system/philosopher that is integral to his beliefs. He is abusing our democracy because he sees a vulnerability within our rushed democracy and huge swaths of land filled with uninformed and uneducated voters. You should look into how Hegel or Marx view countries like Russia and how they fall or how countries like ours fall.

I just don't like Putin being brought back into conversation. They're a very fervent people in an information age. The government as it is right now with the internet might not even be something that can reasonably exist indefinitely. I like our government putting sanctions on them and dealing with that era of foreign policy in a fashion almost completely removed from the general populace. I don't think people in the US are ready enough to tackle this problem head-on. I feel this is something that gets to be too much of an eye roll for some people when there's no definitive plan for Russia even if you can get them behind saying he's evil.

The reason I think that most people are hard to convince on Putin is because they're living in an America which is eerily similar to Russia today.