Oh, I know all that. I just don’t believe Putin had much to do with Regan, as your post posits. There was an interesting picture of Putin meeting with Regan, of course, when he was a fresh faced kid. I also met Ike once, but never had much to do with him.
Putin wasn’t running the USSR, correct. He was working for their secret police force, not a teenager, a grown man. He worked for those who killed tens of millions of people throughout the USSR. He espoused communism and would have had to have been ideologically committed to communism, not a teenager without a choice in his life. As such, as KGB communist, he was the opposite of Reagan, Thatcher, Lech WaÅ‚Ä™sa, and the Pope. He has never been an admirer of any conservatives and says the worst thing that happened in the 20th Century was the collapse of the USSR.