I hear you. Putin is one of those very rare cases where the man personally is very modest and wants no cult of personality - you see that in many small and large ways. For example, when you fly into the US as you walk out through customs you'll see portraits of the US President and, in places like California, the governor. You don't see any of that in Russia. There aren't portraits of Putin hanging in schoolrooms and there's no naming of schools or other facilities using his name.
He wants a str…
I'm an American living in Russia and it never fails to amaze me how the West completely underestimates the truly huge support for Putin at all levels of Russian society, from the grass roots of ordinary people to the professional elite and upper middle class and to the truly powerful. A large majority admiring Putin is one of the genuinely unifying phenomena in Russia that crosses ethnicity, age, and educational and economic status.
So it's extremely difficult to come up with scenarios where suc…