Like most authoritarians, Putin offered a deal to the Russian people: reasonably strong, competent, stable government in exchange for the right to rule arbitrarily. After the chaos of the Yeltsin years, you could make a plausible argument that the Russian people got a decent bargain for about a decade. The economy improved; there were no huge international crises; and the forms of liberal democracy, if not the substance, remained in place. If that was due mostly to an increase in the price of oil, for which Putin deserved little credit, so what?
But what about now? The economy has stalled since the Crimean invasion. Worse, Putin has engaged in a vanity project war that threatens the lives of Russians and hurts their pocketbooks without offering anything to them in return. Tens of thousands of Russian soldiers are dead, for no good reason other than Putin’s desire to recreate the Russian Empire. All forms of dissent have been crushed. The country is now a pure dictatorship, operated and controlled by force–not consent.
It’s time to renegotiate, don’t you think?