[billakay]

Uh, that’s democratically-elected “criminal thug.” As opposed to Putin, who is just a criminal thug. So there is still a difference.

Putin was democratically elected and enjoys a very high level of popular support in Russia. The protests that we saw in 2012 were foreign engineered, much as Maidan was. After the election and the crackdown on political activity by foreign NGOs, these protests mysteriously stopped.

POTUS would give his left testicle (if he has one) to have the kind of approval rating that Putin has.

[Corporate Democrat]

Putin was not democratically elected, unless you think that getting 99.4% of the vote from 99.5% of the voter base in Chechnya is somehow not symptomatic of massive electoral fraud in Putin's favor.

This was just two years ago. For every election where Putin was on the ballot, Chechnya has routinely given Putin 95%+ of the vote even as he ruthlessly suppressed dissension there. How do you explain that?