It is impressive how Putin has suddenly become the embodiment of every book and movie villain, down to the last evil tendency. And we had thought those were mere fiction.
Suddenly?
https://www.ted.com/talks/garry_kasparov_stand_with_ukraine_in_the_fight_against_evil/transcript
The US war on Iraq introduced a large amount of moral relativism into the "Western" world view. Saddam Hussein was evil, but the US invasion was bad. The US may have had better intentions than Saddam, but if the results were similar, who was really the bad guy? Even a few years ago many Americans would agree the Putin was a person they wouldn't want as their own president, but there was still a general respect and "bad boy" admiration for him such as
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wga5A6R9BJg (I was introduced to that video in 2017 I think). He really had to go over the top to finally reveal himself as truly Evil.
It is also crazy how dictators are simply unable to understand democracies. As an example, Japan in WWII expected the US to insist on a peace treaty after Pearl Harbor. Democracies are as unpredictable from a dictator's perspective as dictators are from a democracy's. I think the underlying issue is a lack of information flow out of the democracies. A free market democracy will shrug off pretty much anything, until a sudden breaking point is crossed and then it is all out war. Dictators communicate with other dictators by constant mutual aggression, so that they generally have a pretty good idea what the boundaries are. As an example, Erdogan shot down Russian jets that crossed Turkish airspace, so now Putin doesn't mess with him any more. Putin would never, ever mess with China. So far, no democracy has shot down Russian jets which skim their airspace, so Putin still doesn't know their limits. Possibly, "Western" nations should be taking more aggressive action to deliberately kill Russian military members through direct attacks when they cross lines, which is the only way of conveying to Putin where the boundaries are. Instead, we are all demur until he crosses an unknowable line, and then suddenly we throw everything we have at him.