The only reason why Putin is there now is because we strongly backed Boris Yeltsin despite his unpopularity, we interfered with the 1996 election in order to prevent Communist Party challenger Gennady Zyuganov from winning re-election amidst disastrous liberalization policies and lowering life expectancy, and then Boris Yeltsin ended up appointing Putin, who did war crimes in Chechnya in an effort to appear tough as a strongman against the separatist threat. In 2001, the NYT had op-eds from Thomas Friedman that were "Rootin' for Putin". Had we not interfered, we probably would have had another Gorbachev.