Quote:
Originally Posted by Bluegrassplayer
I find it hard to believe that Trudeau for would wantonly assassinating people if he could. I also do not think he is a psychopath.
Different power structures require different skillsets to rise to the top. Even then, Putin's immediate predecessors were not as bad as him. He has built this system around him and another "leader just as bad as him" likely would not have actually been as bad as him and would have been far better for Russia and the world.
Putin immediate predecessors were worse than him for russians, they were the russian mafia. Putin re-united the power of the state (fairly weak in the 90s) with the actual power in the streets , in finance, and in markets (held by various mafia and mafia-like groups) under himself. The mafia groups did worse than Putin in their local feuds.
The above btw is why putin for a long while genuinely had significant popular support: he improved russians lives more than the predecessors.
Internationally of course the russian mafia(s) did less than Putin is able to do currently, that isn't the only axis to measure how bad people are though.
Russia for a loooong while selected people at the top particularly badly which is why they basically have an uninterrupted streak of horrific leaders (de iure o de facto, local and national) in the last 150+ years.
Putin isn't special in that regard, rather he for a while appeared to be far less disastrous (even for our standard) , which is why the like of Obama, Merkel and others thought things had fundamentally changed in Russia just 15 years ago.
Now we know that wasn't the case, but keep in mind a lot of "very serious people" only started talking about Putin like we do recently, because of the invasion. A lot of "very serious people" were in bed with him till recently.
The third economy in the world (or is it the fourth now?), Germany, bet it's whole economy on Russia and China. Russia for energy and China to sell them stuff.
At last, a lot of those "very serious people" understood you don't negotiate with terrorists nor with dictators that don't bend the knee to the american empire. Fine. But please no moral grandstanding, it's about us having a more functional and less violent empire because it works better, it's not like we are the angels and Putin &C are the demons.
They have to be crushed, he has to be crushed because our empire is better, but we have to prove it.