Plenty of people don’t like Putin, but this is just a vicious cycle and a natural reaction to liberalization of your economy.

Many Global South countries invariably follow the same story:

1. the collapse of the USSR gave the US imperialists an unopposed domination over other countries
2. US then places sanctions on left wing governments in the Global South, destroys their economy and props up right wing dictators, who then killed all the left wing activists
3. young professionals educated from Western institutions came home and brought back neoliberal ideas
4. neoliberal centrist parties elected to power by popular support to fight corruption
5. neoliberal government liberalizes the economy and introduces the wonderful ideas of austerity and mass privatization, which made the economy free fall even worse than before
6. people start to hate liberal economics and Western liberal values
7. left wing government gets elected again and tries to nationalize economies, they get under US sanctions which made things worse
8. people now hate the new left wing government
9. right wing dictators propped up by Western imperialists again, or right wing populists that pose no threat to Western imperialism
10. rinse and repeat steps 4-9

There is no way out of this vicious cycle until Western imperialism is fully and thoroughly defeated.

If you’ve lived your entire life in a Global South country you’ve seen this cycle played out many times already.