i’d wager a guess and say a big portion consider him slightly less evil
I remember, some twenty or thirty years ago, when Yeltsin was considered the "lesser evil". Yeltsin's protege was a young mayor from St. Petersburg named Vladmir Putin.
This isn't a more/less evil situation. It's a "my asshole" or "your asshole" situation. Putin isn't toeing the American line like he promised, when he and Bush Jr broke bread at the turn of the 21st century. So now Americans think he's got to go.
I’m sure people in Russia are fed up in one way or another and just kinda want “change.”
Putin's done a good job of keeping his opposition fractured and at each others' throats. But he's also shamelessly pandered to a sizable base of Russian nationalists who like him for the same reason Americans like Biden. They don't want change. They want stability and growth, minus the threat of scary foreigners. Putin brings that in spades. For all the shit people like to fling around about neoliberalism being when the US does an imperialism, Putin is the model of a Russian neoliberal and popular for that very reason. He's just not allied with Americans in his neoliberalism, and so we try to replace him with a stooge just like we tried to replace Gorbachev.
I remember, some twenty or thirty years ago, when Yeltsin was considered the "lesser evil". Yeltsin's protege was a young mayor from St. Petersburg named Vladmir Putin.
This isn't a more/less evil situation. It's a "my asshole" or "your asshole" situation. Putin isn't toeing the American line like he promised, when he and Bush Jr broke bread at the turn of the 21st century. So now Americans think he's got to go.
Putin's done a good job of keeping his opposition fractured and at each others' throats. But he's also shamelessly pandered to a sizable base of Russian nationalists who like him for the same reason Americans like Biden. They don't want change. They want stability and growth, minus the threat of scary foreigners. Putin brings that in spades. For all the shit people like to fling around about neoliberalism being when the US does an imperialism, Putin is the model of a Russian neoliberal and popular for that very reason. He's just not allied with Americans in his neoliberalism, and so we try to replace him with a stooge just like we tried to replace Gorbachev.