>>19071
Oh definitely. Socially, popular politics, and maintaining an alignment with the Russian Orthodox church and all of its own shady dealings the way large powerful religious organizations invariably get in to (bearing especially in mind that extents of the Eastern half of the Roman Empire, Russia being one of them by way of northward expansion of the Byzantine Empire - one of the threads felt by the Khazars who eventually mass converted to bablyonian talmudism to stand in opposition to both the that and the expanding caliphate to the south.)
You would no sooner expect a president of the US to not pander to a Christian base (even if the red party has much more of a lock on the big fat juicy evangelical part of that pie), or to upset the zionists too far or to squander what is (whether we like it or not) at the very least a valuable strategic alliance with pissrael.
And of course Putin was the star student of soviet spymaster Yuri Andropov, and former head of the KGB. Watching how carefully he presents himself is transparently funny imo, but he knows what he's doing trying to project something of a traditional russian strong man persona, both to pander to a power base in the process of being treatened by multiculturalism, and as a counterbalance to the liberashka crowd and constant US attempts to do cultural subversion 2.0 as they had done previously as part of the effort to topple the USSR. I just think it's funny, from a US perspective, how our own leadership has become so generally derelict that it makes it easy for Putin to play the same silly cold war games, but arguably more effectively most of the time. If nothing else I have to respect the Kremlin's track record for being able to counterbalance American overreach (this debacle in the ukraine being an obvious exception).