Yet, it’s a very accurate assessment. There are contradictions and different reasons why these people on the extremes of politics slavishly follow the Putin line, but for the most part these misfits and nut jobs behind him are not conservatives in any traditional sense of the way that political philosophy has been understood.
Well, many are conservative in comparison to the liberalism of the EU. Jobbik, for example, would have been mainstream a couple of decades ago.
In case of Putin, he exploited the legitimate yearning that the Western conservatives have for a leader who is comfortable with religion and traditional values. They were simply fooled. Let us not forget that USSR was in many ways a deeply conservative country; it was a dictatorship of atheist conservatism. Plus, those people know mimicry, so it was easy for Putin to fool us.
It's tiresome to hear that European nationalists aren't "conservative" from the standpoint of the American political spectrum, because a completely different set of issues define left and right in Europe and in the United States.
The political spectrum in Europe is defined primarily by ethnic and cultural issues, not economic ones. The European Left is internationalist, supports the EU, multiculturalism, and open immigration. The European Right opposes these things. The political spectrum there is defined in terms of Internationalism/Multiculturalism vs. Nationalism, not in terms of statist vs. laissez-faire economics or "big vs. limited government". European countries will always be statist, the only question is what kind of statism they'll have.
Furthermore, American attacks on the European Right are also ridiculous because they only serve to strengthen the alternative, which is internationalism and multiculturalism.