“Then why is putin kissing up to Muslims?”
Putin fancies himself as that gypsy king of Russia’s Muslims. That he knows how to rule over them. That he can bamboozle the Iranians, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan etc.
He might have something there with Iran. He had them paying tens of billions for crap air-defense systems. He did not lift a finger help Ayatollahs, when the US and Israel bombed their critical facilities.
What exactly could he have done?
He gave all that up when his ego began writing checks he can’t cover