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Hell, I like Putin better than the skinny runt in the hut....

Compared to Putin, Obama is Ronald Reagan. Here's a snapshot of Putin's Russia:

Pomerantsev visits a TV studio owned by Kremlin-connected moguls. It’s in a shabby warehouse on the wrong side of town. There’s no sign or address on the metal door. Inside is a dirty little room with a drunk guard.
Pomerantsev goes down a dark corridor and up two flights of dingy stairs to another unmarked metal door. Behind that is a modern, well-lit, busy Western-style production facility. But there’s an inconspicuous door here as well, with a secret code pad. And behind that is a more modern, better-lit, even busier production facility with an even less conspicuous door with an even more secret code leading to the real offices of the moguls, where the real business accounts are kept.
All this is to foil the tax police. Who come anyway. One of the moguls tells Pomerantsev that “the tax police were much happier taking bribes than going to the trouble of stealing money that had been paid in the orthodox fashion.”
Pomerantsev tells the story of Yana Yakovleva, a businesswoman who imported chemicals to make cleaning supplies. She spent seven months in prison because chemicals to make cleaning supplies were suddenly declared “an illegal narcotic substance.”
Usually this kind of abrupt, arbitrary arrest has to do with competitors bribing legislators in order to abscond with someone’s business. Usually the solution is to bribe judges.
But Yana had gotten tangled in the Kremlin machinations of political figures so crooked that they can’t get a bribe straight.
Viktor Cherkesov, head of the FDCS, the Federal Drug Control Service, was attempting to take over Russia’s chemical industry as part of his power struggle with Nikolai Patrushev, head of the FSB, the Federal Security Service, successor agency to the KGB. Vladimir Putin encouraged Cherkesov. Vladimir Putin encouraged Patrushev.
The FDCS uncovered FSB corruption in Chinese customs duty rake-offs. The FSB uncovered FDCS corruption in chemical company seizures. The FDCS arrested FSB generals on the Chinese border. The FSB arrested FDCS generals at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport.
And Yana doesn’t get out of jail until Cherkesov and Patrushev have destroyed each other and Putin is rid of both potential rivals.
...

Russia is a demographic disaster. Nicholas Eberstadt, who holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute, has been studying Russia for decades. His research indicates that that the birth rate per Russian woman is twenty percent below replacement level.
In the first ten years after the collapse of the USSR, Russian population fell by about six and a half million. It is rebounding slightly now but only because of high birth rates in Muslim ethnic regions like Chechnya and Dagestan and immigration from former Soviet republics in Central Asia. These are not places Russia wants its Russians to come from.
Russia’s mortality rate is horrific. According to 2012 World Health Organization statistics, a fifteen-year-old Russian male has a life expectancy that’s three years less than a fifteen-year-old Haitian boy’s.
The life expectancy of a fifteen-year-old Russian female is sixty-one, three years less than in Cambodia.

Without oil and bottomless mineral resources, Russia is Ukraine, except it's nuclear-armed and endlessly expansionist.