Putin is awesome. The perfect antagonist for the West, straight from a Bond movie. He was just what was needed to spice up a boring 21st century.
A Russian president that is intelligent, rules with an iron fist, murders his opponents with polonium, knows judo and made an instruction video about it, ex-KGB, hunts, knows how to put a tiger to sleep, defies the West and gets away with it, supplies equipment to Iran and nobody dares speak against it, and has a youth personality cult in his country for being so awesome.
Sometimes reality beats fiction, my friends. Putin is more awesome than any Bond villian has ever been. Even if Russia is not nearly as strong as the Soviet Union was, it's much more interesting to have this character as an antagonist than Soviet stooges like Kruschev or Breznev.
da 4chan.