...want to be the middle-man AGAIN in the sale of Russian assets. The reason there are oligarchs in Russia is because after the fall of the Soviet Union, we kept the very pliable Boris Yeltsin in power (even rigged the 1996 Russian election) so that Wall Street banks could work the deals to privatize all the state businesses and assets in Russia.

In the 90s Russian life expectancy dropped by something like 3 years. State pensions ended, jobs disappeared. Socialists in the Warsaw pact countries didn't like some limitations on their freedoms, but they really liked the social safety net (this is my wife's entire family). That safety net disappeared in Russia in the 90s. Basically overnight.

Putin is a hero to the Russian people because he stopped that, and since it was only 25 years ago, a huge portion of the population remembers what It isn't hard for me to understand.