Putin is a moron.
Putin is not a moron.
If we only had a clone of him that was American and Pro-America.
Putin is not a moron, he is highly intelligent and fiendishly clever. But he is a Russian, a Muscovite with no sense of the real meaning of liberty as it is known in the West and in a few other places on Earth.
This is their nature. You can’t teach democracy, compromise, and consensus to a people ruled first by Mongols, then Tatars, then the Tsars, then communists from Stalin to Gorbachev, without their seeing the workings and back-and-forth of Western style parliamentarianism as the gathering and nattering of weaklings.
In Russia as in the Muslim world, “the man who gives victory in battle is prized above every other man.”
That’s who they are.