[Edward64]

Originally Posted by Lathum

Thats like saying John Wilkes Booth was a great guy and amazing actor, except for the whole Lincoln assassination thing.

You can't just dismiss it as some minor character flaw.

I'm not arguing that Putin isn't a bad guy. I'm arguing that he has done more good than bad for the regular Russian, and he has done well for his country since the Yeltsin/Gorby days.

FWIW, some insights.

Putin’s Russia, 20 years on – POLITICO

Putin knew what his fellow citizens craved. “Russians have had no sense of stability for the past 10 years,” he told state television ahead of March 2000 presidential elections. “We hope to return this feeling.”

Over the next eight years, aided by rocketing prices for oil — Russia’s main export — Putin set about doing just that. By May 2008, toward the end of his second term in office, salaries were not only being paid on time, but they were higher than ever. The streets of major cities began to fill with advertisements for easy loans, and people long accustomed to frugality suddenly found they could afford foreign holidays, new cars and plasma-screen TVs.

Although political freedoms were being curtailed, independent media strangled, and money that should have been used to build up vital infrastructure simply siphoned out of the country, many Russians stayed silent. After all, it seemed churlish to complain about such things when you could spend two weeks a year at a Turkish Black Sea resort and then come back to your new home entertainment center.

“People agreed on a pact with the devil,” said Oleg Orlov, the head of Memorial, Russia’s oldest human rights organization. “They said, ‘We will stay out of the social and political process and concentrate on our private lives — just don’t touch us and leave us a small slice of the profits from your oil booty.’”

It was, as Russian intellectuals like to say, a case of “sausages in exchange for freedom.”

Sausages won out.

“What good is freedom of speech if my fridge is empty?” an elderly woman asked me in the central city of Voronezh in 2007. I wasn’t sure what to reply, so I mumbled something about how, in an ideal world, she would have both. My answer failed to convince her. “Both?” she said. “Who is going to give me both?”

Putin received praise from unlikely quarters. “Putin inherited a ransacked and bewildered country, with a poor and demoralized people,” said Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet dissident writer. “And he started to do what was possible — a slow and gradual restoration. These efforts were not noticed, nor appreciated, immediately.”

The below quote is interesting. I don't know what trust rating means but his popularity rating has remained about 59%.

The anniversary of Putin’s second decade in power has been accompanied by a tangible cooling of Russia’s passion for the ex-KGB officer who has already outlasted three U.S. presidents and been accused of helping put a fourth into the White House.

In May, Putin’s trust ratings fell to a 13-year low of just 31 percent as discontent simmered over an increase to the pension age, widespread poverty and relentless allegations of corruption against the political elite. Putin came to power promising stability, but his foes are increasingly drawing comparisons with Yeltsin’s “wild” 1990s.

In my trips across Russia, far fewer people seem willing to praise Putin and his policies. Instead, anger and disappointment are much more common.