The tone of this article is weird. On the one hand is the usual emphasis on "bad" Putin, but on the other hand it shows Putin interacting publicly with critics

The tone of this article is weird. On the one hand is the usual emphasis on "bad" Putin, but on the other hand it shows Putin interacting publicly with critics and the elected body as you would want to see in an open society. I'm not saying that Russia is such, just that things don't fit our simple preconceptions. As for Putin himself, this shows him coming a bit out of his isolation. He used to be aggressive in interacting with the public, but has reportedly become isolated and stale over the past decade. He has also from the beginning leaned more dovish than the norm for the Kremlin. So when he is replaced, as must happen eventually, it will be by someone certainly more energetic and probably more hawkish. If you are curious about Putin as a person, Mark Galeotti's We Need to Talk about Putin (2019) is a brief, cautious political biography. He has a video up with the same title, that doesn't quite cover the same material. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooUIS9c4zIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooUIS9c4zIw)