Russian may want democracy (though do we know that they do?), but there’s more than just Putin in the way.
For that matter, a number of Soviet successor states are successfully functioning democracies.
There are no differences between them in foreign affairs. Both favor wage suppression policies. Both favor currency manipulation to suppress consumption in order to help exporters. None of them is doing anything about the worst housing crisis in the world, leading to a demographic suicide of the country - fertility rate is below 1.3 for 20 years and counting. In many way, it's a choice between Pepsi and Coca-cola
Given that this is hardly unique to the US, I think Russia is reaping the whirlwind: they've been up to this sort of thing pretty much everywhere. This is not the WWIII. They have been waging the WWIII already, this whole time, in relatively novel ways, with a lot of success… until now.
And it's been the kind of success that is short-sighted: got their way again and again at the cost of building enormous hostility, which is now rebounding upon them. Russia made this bed and all of this is not that much of a surprise, really.
The Republican Party has been the safe harbor for christian and white supremacists beginning with Reagan and the moral majority. The love of violence, "I got mine" attitudes, gleeful wastefulness, etc have been American ills long before ~2010s era Russian misinfo campaigns.
Also, speaking as an American who has had their worldview impacted by living in Europe for a while, it is beyond pathetic for liberal Americans to tell the world "Don't worry we aren't crazy! The Russians made us do the bad stuff!". As the richest country in the world, we have to take accountability.
I think more seriously the US is a limited democracy because neither party really works for the people. They both work for the donors, one just a lot more and transparent than the other.
They're terrorists because they don't want to give the government absolute power? You're doing the same thing Republicans did to Middle Eastern countries in past decades, abuse the shit out of them then call them terrorists when they try to defend themselves.
Before the KMT lost power I think it was reasonable to see Taiwan as a one party state, but no longer. You are a little ambiguous in the "two countries" do things, but I guess you mean Korea and Taiwan. Yeah, both countries are not paradises that have solved all issues, but they keep improving their freedom, industrial bases, and living standards for the average person. Is that true for the us - we should aspire to do that. Instead we have people arguing on school boards whether books that dare to discuss slavery or jim crow laws should be discussed at all. We aren't clearly moving to be a better society with that kind of stuff.
It might be similar in Russia, though I’d imagine the heavily entrenched establishment, with massive reliance on various police forces, lends itself less to rapid democratisation-though you never know.
My personal opinion, South Korea deserves a big asterisk. They had a president that was trapped in a cult, and the large conglomerates still decide a lot.
Taiwan is #11 on the list, that is higher than the US and UK (obviously), and one spot ahead of Switzerland. If Taiwan was in Europe it would still be among the most democratic countries.
Sure it has flaws, but so does almost every country on the list. Heck, I'm Norwegian and Norway is #1 but I think it still has flaws. My main beef is some technicality called sperregrense, basically if your party is less than 4% it will get less representation than it deserves. This quite often decides the coalition in charge depending on which parties ends up at 3.9 or 4.0.
According to the Democracy Index, ~75 countries are full or flawed democracies, so 75 countries made the leap.
In fact in the UK it’s probably hard to pinpoint where real monarchy ended and democracy started. The monarch had less and less power over time, and an increasingly wide circle of privileged voters held more and more power.
Many struggling democracies had to make that leap much more quickly and often the failures of democracy are to do with the cultural remains of the previous systems.
I would put it more or less around Oliver Cromwell's tenure, even though the monarchy enjoyed some resurgence in power after the monarchy was restored it was short lived and the threat of parliament removing an unruly monarch, as they had done fairly decisively, became a real constraint on their power.
The struggles around that were also significant inspirations to French and American revolutions that followed.
Whether people approve or disapprove of Putin, a lot of them remember what life was like before he became Tsar-for-life, and it isn't something that most of them want to tangle with again.
And that proved to be one of the most disastrous decades in Russian history (I think only surpassed by the 1940s that saw them getting invaded by Hitler), so democracy doesn't have too much solid ground to stand on when it comes to Russia.