[paganel]

> Who on earth believed that Russia was anything but a de facto dictatorship for roughly the past two decades?

There were lots of people in the Western media who genuinely believed that Putin would be toppled by Russian oligarchs just after the war in Ukraine got more intense in February 2022, on account of "this war is bad for the business of Russian oligarchs, hence they'll get rid of Putin". From the horse's mouth, a CNN article from March of 2022 [1]:

> Officials say their intentions are to squeeze those who have profited from Putin’s rule and potentially apply internal pressure for Russia to scale back or call off the offensive in Ukraine.

That "internal pressure" is mentioned in connection with the bad oligarchs, in fact as an implicit anti-thesis of those bad oligarchs "who have profited from Putin’s rule", the implication being that there were other oligarchs, supposedly the good ones, who would have forced Putin's hand to end the war. That did not happen, was never in the cards to happen, in fact.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/25/world/russian-oligarch-st...

[mullingitover]

I think this was more wishcasting than realistic analysis of what Putin would do and how much leverage his pawns had against him.

[paganel]

It might well have been, but the fact that the West first sanctioned the Russian oligarchs (even before 2022) showed that they really did believe in that wishcasting, i.e. they really did believe that the oligarchs will react “economically rational” and do something about Putin so the sanctions would go away.