“The number of people who seem to think that Putin is the most extreme and bloodthirsty member of the Russian government is a monument to ignorance”.
That’s the truth.
It's utter rubbish, is what it is.
You have Communists to his left and racial ultranationalists to his right. You also have those in his own party and military who are pushing for quicker and faster escalation in Ukraine, to actually upgrade to a full-blown war instead of the "military special operation" it's been legally categorized as thus far.
Putin is an authoritarian to be sure, but it could easily be far worse, such as Gennady Zyuganov, the current head of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation; or Leonid Slutsky and Alexei Didenko, leaders of the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (who share positions of the recently deceased former party leader Zhirinovsky, who advocated for deportation of Chinese and Japanese from the Russian Far East, and for abolishing all political parties in Russia in a return to a more imperial system); or Sergey Mironov, head of the socialist "A Just Russia" party.