He and his party are the liberals who carried out a coup and then formally dissolved the USSR against the wishes of the public, then spent the next twenty years eagerly collaborating with the US, sucking up to the US, and being propped up by the US. Even now he's just a sad old liberal trailing after the American far right and implementing American style reactionary laws in the hopes that they'll finally accept him, even with the ongoing war to keep American nukes from being parked a stone's throw away from Moscow.