alt Hacker News> pre-2022 Russia was seen and how pre-Trump-second-term US used to be seen until not that long ago, i.e. both governments were believed to be run by big business
Who on earth believed that Russia was anything but a de facto dictatorship for roughly the past two decades? Putin murdering with impunity has been a running gag since 2003[1].
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/putin-critics-dead-full-list-navaln...
> Who on earth believed that Russia was anything but a de facto dictatorship for roughly the past two decades?
There were lots of people in the Western media who genuinely believed that Putin would be toppled by Russian oligarchs just after the war in Ukraine got more intense in February 2022, on account of "this war is bad for the business of Russian oligarchs, hence they'll get rid of Putin". From the horse's mouth, a CNN article from March of 2022 [1]:
> Officials say their intentions are to squeeze those who have profited from Putin’s rule and potentially apply internal pressure for Russia to scale back or call off the offensive in Ukraine.
That "internal pressure" is mentioned in connection with the bad oligarchs, in fact as an implicit anti-thesis of those bad oligarchs "who have profited from Putin’s rule", the implication being that there were other oligarchs, supposedly the good ones, who would have forced Putin's hand to end the war. That did not happen, was never in the cards to happen, in fact.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/25/world/russian-oligarch-st...