The reason many of us praise Putin is that he has turned Russia back towards her religious heritage--a major need after over 70 years of Communist corruption;--has not fallen into the insanity in so much of the West, which denigrates your own identity as a people; and has not embraced the corruption of the sanctity of marriage & normal sexuality, which embraces such idiocy as the oxymoron of "same sex marriage."
Putin is certainly not perfect; but the side he is showing since he regained his high office, looks pretty good compared to what we have had the past 20+ years.
You cannot excuse the one and not the other, unless you intend to be hypocritical about it.