Aaron makes the same point I made before. The western assholes relied on Putin's extreme rationality. Western Media portray Putin as pissed off deranged maniac bent over on restoring USSR. In reality it's a complete lie and they know it. Putin is extremely cold, rational and calculating individual who they know would never do anything crazy. That's really his weakness. That allowed western nazi regime to keep pushing and pushing. I bet If we had Medvedev as president, west would not dare to go that far. I mean, they would have still attacked Russia but would have backed off after Medvedev started answering in kind.
Putin needs to get visibly mad a little and overreact from time to time instead of under-reacting all the time. This is hard for him to do I think, after all, he is not an actor (like certain individual) or even trained politician. And after 25 years in power, nobody would buy it.
So this is the irony of it all. If we had less overall capable president in Russia the war would have gone much better for everybody. Better (for the moment) president of Russia would not give Elensky personal safety grantees. He would call him and told him "I know you are afraid of your nazis and I feel for you, but you should be afraid of me and if you don't do what you promised to do and what I tell you to do I would kill you".
Russia should have been doing to Ukrainian officials what Israel did to Hamas, systematically exterminating them. Instead we have CIA helping ukro-nazi to assassinate russian journalists, generals, politicians in ..... Russia