The Suspected Poisoning of Alexey Navalny, Putin’s Most Prominent Adversary

Russia definitely has the talent.

To win what? Lets not forget what the stakes are, the countries where all these narcissistic psychopaths were either elected or self imposed dictators for life were held back. Who wants a president who considers winning a personal gain? It is extremely harmful for the short and long term as well.

A president has to inspire unity for the country and most dictators suppress and hide the fact that they don’t even have half the country supporting them using different tactics from rigging elections to squashing the opposition.

I think it probably seems like an outlier from a euro-centric (in a more literal sense, not in the pejorative sense) point-of-view because it is, in general, close enough to European cultures to be similar but distant enough to be distinct. Whereas other cultures/histories may be easier to bucket as "clearly distinct" and therefor not outliers.

Also Sergei Skripal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Skripal

Using WMD to take out a single person does indeed seem like making a political statement.

I was born in Russia and I despise Putin. He is the reason why I emigrated. He and his cronies brough the country into the dark age, from which it may never come out. He is, without a single doubt, Hitler of the 21st century.

* He consolidated all the political and judicial power. Destroyed, physically, politically or judicially all the opponents. Elections are completely fake.

* He completely controls all secret services, with vast spying network and formidable IT intrusion capabilities.

* He implemented full and completely legal surveilance state. Documented and legally mandated recording of all the cellphone communications, email, internet access logs. They urgently started building DNA database of all the citizens. Every citizen will be assigned a unique number to which all the data from all the agencies will be tied. Even a regular neighborhood policeman will have access to all this data. Cameras with face recognition being installed all over Moscow. Chinese-like internet firewall is being created.

* He controls the organized crime networks, in fact his whole gang who is in charge of Russia grew out of that crime syndicate.

* He leads and benefits from a group of very powerful "capitalists", serving the regime needs in many, many different ways around the world and internally.

* He completely controls all the media (bought out by his cronies or nationalized), which helped him create a blatant propaganda machine, rivaled probably only by Chinese and North Koreans. They can spin anything. People in Russia are utterly confused and don't believe in reality anymore. They are drowned in ridiculous bullshit all day long and conspiracy theories are being distributed by state TV channels.

* He usied this propaganda machine to create myth of the great Russian world and moral and intellectual exceptionality of Slavs. Constantly bringing up the great heroic ancestors and their achievement in WW2, and duty if modern Russians to not squander what they achieved. There's constantly talks about how Russia is the only true God's country, and that it's a moral savior of the world. There's an instilled feeling of victimhood, almost sainthood, of Russian culture. Everything that happens is somebody else's fault, a foreign influence, an accident, or sabotage. They truly believe that russians are the greatest people on Earth.

* He annexed Crimea, created instability and puppet regimes in many bordering states. His next possible goal is Belarus.

I believe, these are pretty much all the ingredients necessary to build a nazi/fascist state, and that is in fact exactly what they've built.