Americans have an especially difficult time understanding how different the Russian mindset and worldview is when compared to our own.
Putin doesn't have to consult the ACLU, Dershowitz, or CAIR to ask if it's OK for him to brutally crush and exterminate his Muslim upstarts.
Nor is he burdened with any semblance of a Western Christian conscience when it comes to alliances and treaties...he like all Russian leaders past, present, and future, will do exactly what benefits Russia the most, and he couldn't care less if it's Satan himself who is Russia's trading partner.
Unlike the U.S., the Russian's historical world view sees a time span covering centuries and centuries, multiple foreign invasions, famines, repressions, death by the millions of their countrymen, and a better understanding of "the Russian soul", as they themselves refer to it.
Russians themselves know that the only way they will ever be kept united and moving forward, is by brute force and an iron fist, in the form of a Peter the Great, Lenin, Stalin, Kruschev, or Putin.
One of their national sayings about themselves is "Always beaten; never defeated".
More likely than not we are at this moment witnessing the most "liberal" era in Russian history under Putin.
Permit me to add my perspective as someone whose family fought with the soviets to defeat the nazi-fascists and as an act of gratitude the soviets repressed us. But let me add this caveat, my disdain for the soviets and to a large degree czarist russia which by default extends to today has grown more because what I learn, realize and understand about russia.
As you said russians have that saying 'always beaten, never defeated' a large reason is because russians in power have had a tendency to abuse the working class. History has shown.
Also, the fact that Putin repressed certain media is not necessarily a bad thing in some cases if the media was going to cause instability.
Russia has no concept of things that Americans enjoy that are guarunteed to us by The United States Constitution. Russians for the most part want to be left alone but when America goes stomping around in Serbia Russia will find an excuse to become hostile.
One thing that the western media conveniently forgets to tell people about why russia invaded afghanistan was because of the militant muzlimz that were making their way into soviet territory. With them they were bringing a drug cartel peddling opium. Nonetheless the Americans had to get involved because the soviets were imperealistic despite what their propoganda says about America.
The russians are bitter now that America is trying to get it to join nato, the russians are pissed that the ukraine is joining nato when even almost *all* ukrainians dont want to join nato. A little bit of interesting trivia, Ukraines president Yushchenko is from western ukriane. Western ukrainians were notorious for joining with the nazis during WW2. Yushchenko is removing statues and monuments put up for russian soldiers who fought off the nazi-fascists.
Under putin things improved in russia, the main reason is because of russias oil not putins skill. But putin stole those oil reserves from the private developers and put them into prison.
Anyway, the russians are bitter about Serbia and are disgusted with America for having condemned them for destroying the chechens who were also nazi-fascist collaborators. Thats why they call us stupid Americans because we have no idea what happened during WW2 in eastern europe. To a certain degree eastern europe is still fighting little battles with nazi-collaborators. Unfortunately American policy doesnt take that into account because there are a lot of ignorant pinhead elitists running the government.
Idiot liberals have completely torn this country to pieces which was started by Clinton.
I'm not trying to make a case for russia because I firmly believe russia has to be engaged politically russia does have the potential to be a rogue state and a loose cannon. The old soviet guard operates in iran, syria and south America. America has to be smarter about how to eliminate those threats accordingly and tell the backstabing liberal scum to shut the %#@ up. Still we cant run around russias backyard unprovoked and encouraging sepratist movements like kosovo. If anything had America sided with the Serbians America would have had a far stronger ally in eastern europe than we do with albanians.
I wouldnt be too surprised if most if not all of those so-called massacers that albanians say they had to suffer through were staged events to draw America into a confrontation with eastern europe.
The purpose being to distract us from the events that would unfold in the coming months and leading up to 9/11. The muzlimz are just that siniser.