Can’t argue there. Putin does seem to go his own way with Russia, which I hoped we would always do with our country.
Please live in Russia as I have before praising Putin. Living there made Obama’s America look good in comparison. And now with Trump, the MAGA movement is going full speed and America is re-discovering her inner greatness.
Putin and his oligarchs have robbed the Russian people blind but Russians had such little self-worth following the USSR, they were easy prey for the ensuing propaganda and rhetoric of recovering their former so-called superpower glory.
Plus oil prices were good enough for awhile. But in exchange for acceptable living standards, Russians willingly gave up their freedom and their voice. The insurmountable corruption is biting very very hard right now — among other social crises we hardly hear about in the West: an HIV epidemic affecting up to 1% of the entire Russian population, low birthrates + demographic crisis, 3rd world conditions beyond the big cities, broken relations with their brother nation Ukraine, and fragile race relations between ethnic Russians and Muslims (both native and immigrant.)
Moscow has the highest number of Muslims of any city in Europe.
That all being said, Russia’s post-Putin future is quite bright!
But let’s not allow for the leadership vacuum in the West (pre-Trump) distort our view.
For all his fake touting of Christian values, Putin has been a two-faced nightmare and represents every tendency our American founding fathers wanted to guard posterity us against.