Putin does seem to promote stability as a good thing both inside and outside Russia.
If stability means you can’t have free elections, opponents, or dissenting voices in the press....
...yeah I guess that is stability, just a more nuanced version of China.
I think it is not the case anymore.
The two final nails in the coffin of Yeltsin regime were the Asian crisis of 1998 when Russia defaulted on T-bonds and his failure to stand to NATO on Yugoslavia.
Pristina dash by VDV in an attempt to relieve Serbian troops in Kosovo was an obvious military coup against Yeltsin’s policies and had enjoyed widespread public support.
Yeltsin’s sponsors realized that he was over and some “patriotic” replacement was needed or some grassroot replacement is going to produce itself.
It didn’t play out for several reasons. First, Yeltsin’s comprador oligarchy was insolvent resulting in an average monthly income of $64 for the majority of Russians, where everything was owned by two dozen people who used organized crime to suppress all sorts of economic activity, except oil export.
Putin had to do something about it for universal poverty not to allow the rise of the left.
The attacks on the Clinton-connected oligarchs and their gangs were that first produced bad press for Putin and disaffection towards him from the Western establishment.
It was also the factor of economic boom when the oligarch’s “businesses” converted to publicly traded companies which finally began to pay taxes, and the racketeers were over, where the pawn shops expanded, converting into shopping malls and supermarket chains.
On foreign policy the problem was Putin’s complicity with the NATO operation in Afghanistan. It didn’t work well with the patriotic crowd for two reasons. First, NATO military had a bunch of “Peace Corps” community organizers with them who started to indoctrinate the Central Asians that their misery is the result of “Russian enslavement” over the last 200 years. Then Bush planned missiles in Poland, said against Iran but nobody believed it. Also Putin finally pulled the military bases from Cuba and Vietnam, where NATO kept expanding towards Russia.
Last but not least the Chechen invasion of mainland Russia in 1999 and the following war, where Al-Qaeda enjoyed the support of the Washington-based ACPC chaired by Brzezinski and Heig.
In such circumstances, Putin’s administration by 2004 was in a two-front situation, with Western globalists on one side attacking his economic policies, on the other side patriots and military, disaffected over his foreign policies.
I think that between 2004-2007 he leaned to the globalists trying to explain to them his problems with the other side, but failed to reach understanding. They thought they were still in control and able to pull regime change if he fails to tow in line.
The result was Putin’s Munich speech in 2007, rejecting the Western agenda and his pivot to Asia.
Hence the Western-instigated Georgian crisis, pipeline wars, Navalny, and finally Ukraine with all the related sanctions.