Let me assume your question is not rhetorical, and I will try to give you at least what I understand to be part of the answer. This will run a bit long, and, m

Let me assume your question is not rhetorical, and I will try to give you at least what I understand to be part of the answer. This will run a bit long, and, most likely, not be well received by the audience on this website, but I promise, I am not a bot, not "paid by the Kremlin", and, if I sold my soul for my beliefs, the courier is desperately late with the check. The most common narrative, supported by endless social media personalities on the Russian "liberal left" is that the Soviet Union was Double-Plus-Ungood, (for the American audience, the joke is that "the younger the blogger, the more he suffered under Stalin"), the 90s were a time of flowering possibility for Democracy and Freedom, and then Evil Pootin the Horrible showed up, and ruined things for everyone. In the interest of space, I won't get into the Soviet era, let's just leave it at "it's not as simple as you think", and when many, many people who actually live in Russia today look back on that era, they see much more of a mixed bag than just the "Gulag And Repressions" narrative, and the more the left pushes this fiction, the less relevant their voices become. If you struggle to understand "how can anyone support HIM?!", we need a bit of background. Psychologically, modern Russia is heavily shaped by the 90s. The flowering of "Democracy" was chiefly embodied by incredibly flawed elections that brough Boris Yeltzin to power. And as Russian citizens watched in disbelief while Yeltzin stumbled around the world stage in a perennially drunken stupor, various economic "reformers" were taking the fullest possible advantage of the "Freedom" they were suddenly afforded. For an informed non-partisan's view of the economic pillaging, I refer you to the many speeches made by Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, one of the main economic advisors to the Russian "reformers" of the time - chiefly Anatoly Chubais and Egor Gaidar. See also some of their remarks to get a measure of just how much contempt they had for the very people they would leave destitute. For those readers who did not follow those events - all valuable production "actives" (assets in English) were thought to be collectively owned by Soviet citizens. To transition the country to a capitalist economy, a "privitization" scheme was devised. In what should come as a surprise to literally no one, it was, of course, a completely fraudulent process and led to the rapid accumulation of wealth creating the very oligarchs whose influence the left will come to decry (after, of course, being hired by those very oligarchs to promote their rule). The new owners were only interested in rapid profit, which meant that factories were shuttered, cut up and sold for scrap, and the profits offshored into tax havens. Workers formerly employed were fired, and the entire country slid further and further into becoming a rust belt. For most regular people in Russia, the 90s in post-Soviet Russia became a lost decade. Loss of identity and purpose, combined with economic stagnation, widespread unemployment, devaluation of the currency thrust millions of people into poverty. The excess mortality of the 90s from early death, suicide, and emigration is estimated at roughly 10 million - a third of the losses suffered by the Soviet Union during WWII. And this is "peacetime". The other delightful aspect of this situation was the rise of various organized crime groups, strengthened by military veterans and former members of various special agencies who found themselves out of a job, and hired out to the very oligarchs above. Assassinations of business competitors took place in broad daylight. Street violence, kidnappings, looting and murder were commonplace. The government was too busy getting bribed by the oligarchs to look the other way, or too busy "getting while the getting was good". I could go on, but I hope you get the point. On the international scene, Russia obviously stopped being a relevant factor. This is the beginning of American's "Unipolar Moment", and Rusian citizens watched as the US took full advantage of this fact. They also watched as the US lavished Russia's corrupt government and its oligarchs with blandishments of how "democratic" Russia was becoming, and how "democracy" was going to make life better. Various NGOs sprung up, quietly paid for by outfits like USAID, NED, Open Society Foundation, and hired Russian liberal left personalities and had them promote the idea that "old Russia" was bad, and that "new Russia" was on its way to becoming a part of the civilized, collective West. The more effort such groups spent, the worse life seemed to get and the more firmly the idea that democracy and Western-directed reforms were inimical to Russia's collective interests took hold in the minds of many people living in Russia. And let's be honest, various Russian politicians were certainly busy helping that narrative along in the interests of their own political advancement, including a hard-right member of the already right-wing Yabloko party who started off promoting himself on a die-hard patriotic and xenophobic platform. He was so radical, Yabloko kicked him out. He reinvented himself, went to Yale, and would eventually return to Russia to feature prominently as a "fighter against corruption". (That joke's for my Russian-politics aware liberal left homies.) And then came 1999, and the invasion of Yugoslavia. Again the outlooks diverged: for the West, it's an open-and-shut "we went in to stop a genocide" case. For Russians, this is the West coming in yet again to destroy a Slavic country. Irrespective of the facts, what will come to matter is the feeling that "invasion based on duty-to-protect" is legit, that starting a war in Europe without a UN mandate is ok, and the affirmation of the fact that the West (collectively) feels entitled to ignore warnings from Russian politicians. Particularly those of one rising politician from Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) who will, one year later, come to supreme power in Russia in a completely fraudulent and bought election that the West will, of course, praise as being "progress towards Democracy". No, seriously, the US hailed it as such. US foreign policy establishment felt that as this politician came from Yeltzin's retinue, he would, naturally, continue Yeltzin's laissez-faire approach to, well, everything. They were, of course, wrong. For my own part, let me just add that when I learned that German warplanes painted with the balkenkreuz were once again bombing Europe, I felt an incredible sense of anger and betrayal. That Germany once again was bombing Yugoslavia, after everything that had happened in WWII, and that Europe's elites were standing by and cheering while this went on made it clear that we no longer share the same comprehension of history. Still with me? Awesome. I hope this background gives some idea as to the challenges Putin faces when he comes to power. Putin choses the Lord Vetinary approach - he cannot eliminate corruption so he makes it manageable. Most oligarchs go along, retain their looted wealth, but their political power is curtailed. Those who do not go along are eliminated by their competitors, or are banished and suddenly join the liberal left opposition to Putin (shoutout to Khodorkovsky). Putin stabilizes enough of the economy so that people have jobs. Maybe not great ones, but there is an emergent sense of purpose. And he stops the street violence and the chaos. It is probably impossible for people that didn't live through the 90s to understand, but for many, the position is literally "anything is better than that". In this case, "anything" is Putin, and there is genuine, real support for him because of that. We really don't have the space to get into the international questions, it's a huge area, but again, let me just hint that the Western narrative of what is going on is widely rejected by regular people living in Russia in no small part because the ever-chittering horde of liberal-left commentators does their best to rebroadcast the Western narrative in the Russian language. Quite a few folks will automatically take a position opposite whatever a liberal-left commentator says, based on prior experience. The Western narrative is aimed at a Western audience and crafted to omit history and facts that are relevant to a Russian audience, which is why it doesn't work there. So, to return to your original question, when you say that you signed "anti-Kremlin" petitions, most regular people interpret that as "so, you want to go back to the 90's 'democracy', do you? No thank you". When you say "you sent money to Ukraine and her people", many people in Russia will say: "so, you support a government whose national hero was a Nazi collaborator who committed ethnic cleansing of Poles, Russians and Jews." Putin is far from perfect and modern Russia has many trends I'm deeply unhappy with. But the fact is that every alternative suggested by the West or its puppets is immeasurably, inconceivably worse. No one sold their soul for money - we just have a different value function, and are using a different set of inputs.