And to top it off: they’ve banned Christian evangelism.
(Christian missionaries have made strides in the Caucuses and other Muslim areas)
Yes, Putin doesn’t respect religion as a freely exercised matter of individual conscience. He really doesn’t respect anything at all about Christianity. What he does with Christianity is similar to what Stalin did with it when the Nazis were deep inside Russia. He uses it to unify the Russian people behind his closely controlled, top-down, state-controlled (i.e., Putin controlled) religion. It has nothing to do with Christianity as it has traditionally been understood.