I’m vaguely thinking about supporting a war with Russia, simply on the basis that we need to break the stasis we’ve fallen into with a big war. This isn’t for or against liberal technocracy or Putinism or whatever the Russian ideology is. It’s more about getting us moving.
The pressure to make him out as a Russian stooge may cause some kind of unconscious flip reaction where he goes after Russia too hard, turning into the opposite of what the left says he is. Retrospectively, he would be blamed as a warmonger.