But is that what he still is? I’m not saying it’s a sure thing cause I don’t know the man but people can and do have coming to God moments and turn from their old ways. Just wondering why can’t Putin be given the benefit of the doubt? After all, he seems to be pro- Christian, church and family these days.
Putin’s goal is to restore the Russian imperial state. The USSR mobilized it by appeals to Marxist-Leninism and soviet man, post-Yeltsin Russia is doing it by elevating the Orthodox Church and Russian nationalism. The only thing the Russian elite believes in is maintaining and acquiring power.
But the goal is the same - achieve local strategic dominance and creep outward from there. The first thing the USSR did after winning their civil war was to retake the Ukraine.
It then immediately tried for Poland but had to wait for WW2 before entirely locking up Eastern Europe and the baltics. Russia is struggling against Islam only because it interferes with its political hegemony in Chechnya and Central Asia.
Insofar Putin was rooting for Trump it’s because he thinks Trump will pull us out of NATO. That seems unlikely to happen - the defense community has been making the same point Trump did for decades that Europe needs to pay for more of its own defense burden for NATO’s security guarantee to be stable, but he’s been saying it much more stridently than anyone has before.
Syria is the other obvious place where Trump is better for Russia than Clinton. Defeating ISIS will stabilize the Syrian government who is his client state as well as Iraq.