The Anti-Corruption Foundation, which criticizes Putin and is reputed to be the best independent pollster in Russia, just did a poll in Germany & France. It asked: who's responsible for starting the Ukraine war?
Here's Germany's result:
Here are the polling numbers from France:
It appears that both in Germany and France, more people believe that the US is responsible for starting the war in Ukraine than believe that Putin is responsible.
Leonid Volkov of the Anti-Corruption Foundation claims that these numbers show how effective Putin's propaganda is in Germany & France.
This is a laughable explanation of the numbers given that populations of Germany and France are exposed to US propaganda to a far greater degree than they are exposed to Russian propaganda. In fact, much of Russian media is even banned in EU at this point.
One can only imagine what these numbers would look like if the populations of Germany and France were not being bombarded with US government propaganda about the origins of the Ukraine war.
Putin is god almighty vs all Russians are orcs - two button meme (liberals press both).
Actually this narration is quite understandable for two reasons, first is idealism and fear of marxism, capitalist media fear doing the materialist analysis of material conditions, so they instead press the most vulgar idealist interpretation for which even Ranke and Gibbon would kick their asses. And no wonder, imagine what would happen if people suddenly started to use historical materialism! Second is the realpolitik, if they manage to get rid of Putin and vassalize Russia they would need to tone down the hatred in order to control it and direct it to next target.
I'm also at a loss as to what these people expect will happen if Putin somehow got ousted. He's basically a moderate in Russia, it's likely that Medvedev or maybe even somebody like Kadyrov could get in power after. The fixation on Putin shows utter lack of understanding of Russian politics.