Until the evening of Tuesday November 8, 2016 there wasn’t a commie dictator that a Democrat didn’t love.
There still isn’t. Putin is a nationalist, not a communist. By the demise of the Soviet Union, even the KGB didn’t believe in that Marxist hogwash anymore. They switched to (crony) capitalism to save their country from the economic collapse they saw happening. If there’s one thing western globalists hate it’s a nationalist.