Let's be clear here, we're only talking about Putin in this thread because you wanted to know if he was fascist. No one here has been defending Putin, they've been explaining why your understanding of terms like fascism are not well formed and that it is far more accurate to label Putin as a liberal. Not in spite of all of the horrible things Putin stands for, but precisely because those horrible things are consistent with liberalism.

But the original post was about Ukraine. Putin is only relevant if you believe the conflict in Ukraine is between Putin and Ukraine. It is not.

The conflict in Ukraine is a civil war that has been ongoing for years before any Russian involvement. The sides in that conflict are the increasingly nationalistic government that came into power following a coup, and the people of the Donbas region who have been facing increasing levels of ethnic discrimination, political disenfranchisement, and legal barriers to social and economic participation in society under that new increasingly nationalistic government. This elevated into the Donbas war, with the national government and private militias shelling civilian centers throughout the Donbas, resulting in a refugee crisis of people fleeing into Russia to seek asylum. This fighting had been ongoing for years, with Russia stepping in to negotiate a ceasefire in the form of the Minsk agreements long before any military intervention was considered. Ukraine ended up being the one to break the terms of the Minsk agreement and started hostilities back up, at which point the Luhansk People's Republic and Donetsk People's Republic saw full separation from Ukraine as the only viable end to the war. They began petitioning for outside military assistance, and that was when Russian military intervention started in the Donbas war.

The Ukrainian national government is 100% the aggressor in this conflict, with their claim to acting in a defensive capacity based on nothing more than political borders and "blood and soil" rhetoric. That doesn't mean that Putin is "the good guy," he almost certainly has self serving goals that he is able to pursue that motivated his decision to provide the military support that the LPR and DPR asked for. But a critique of Putin doesn't change the fact that the LPR and DPR are justified in fighting for their autonomy, and that justification doesn't go away just because military assistance from Russia was the best option available to them out of a set of bad options. They shouldn't have to roll over and submit to being second class citizens in a country that has been stripping their rights away and murdering them just because you don't like the guy that responded to their request for assistance.

And as for Putin having self serving goals with regards to his involvement in this conflict, the same could be said of US/NATO involvement in this conflict. The government that came into power following the Euromaiden coup was propped up in part through US support, and US/NATO weapons were slowly being stockpiled in Kiev with missile silos being placed within striking distance of Moscow close enough that they could strike critical infrastructure and high value targets without having enough time to deploy defensive countermeasures once their early warning equipment has detected a missile has been launched. When taken in the context of the US and NATO's consistent aggressive posturing towards Russia, Russia seems as if it has a legitimate national security motivating it's involvement in Ukraine. Unless you think that "na na na na na I'm not touching you" is a legitimate geopolitical argument for why installing first strike capabilities on the doorstep of someone you have declared to be your adversary is actually completely neutral/defensive act and not a naked act of aggression.