I do read your posts carefully. I’m sorry, because I try to find common ground with people, but I don’t believe one word of this.
This is digital thinking on your part. You put ideas into two boxes - one labelled good and the other labelled evil - and as you think the West is evil and Putin opposes the West, he must go in the good box because there is nowhere else to put him.
I’m not a digital thinker. I’m a pluralist (things can be more than one thing at a time) and a relativist (nobody is good or evil, people all do good stuff and bad stuff, and all we can do is try to do less bad stuff and more good stuff. Some people do a lot of good stuff like Martin Luther King. Some people do a lot of bad stuff like Putin.)
Once again you deny agency to the people of Ukraine. They remember being under the Russian yoke. When their leader Yukoshenko leaned to Moscow against their will, they demonstrated that they wanted Western freedom and prosperity in their Maidan.
Putin can’t “break” NATO. He is clearly unable to subdue one relatively poor nation, so the well-equipped and trained NATO military would flatten his military very quickly. Russia has half the GDP of UK, or of France, or of Germany. All they have going for them is raw materials and these will run out one day, hence the land grab into Ukraine. No different to the Bush-Rumsfeld-Cheney-Halliburton oil grab of Iraq. They said they were liberators too.
How could Putin “hide” when he was a senior KGB agent in the Soviet regime, and then went into politics? Hide from whom?
His attempt at forcible regime change in Kyiv failed due to the incompetence of his military (remember that massive armoured column?) and now he is seeking to create a buffer zone, using the actual Nazis of the mercenary Wagner Group. So this deNazification rhetoric is nonsense. You can’t remove Nazis by adding more Nazis in. You just get more Nazis.
He owns a $100M superyacht by the way. It was berthed in Hamburg but abruptly left before the Germans seized it.
https://www.businessinsider.com/put...amid-sanction-threats-report-2022-2?r=US&IR=T
How do you think he afforded that on a Lt-Col’s pension?
You also have to consider some of the fans he has in the West. Actual fascists. People who admire only strength and the will to impose authoritarianism. They despise kindness and social justice. Avoid these people.