Noriega, Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein, etc, -the list is long of US designated criminals -real or imagined.It's all semantics, but I consider Vladimir Putin to be the head of a criminal oligarchy.
The point of ALL OF THIS IS SO WHAT.
Play the man at the table- he's head of state,and state need to engage realpolitik
what you think of him is completely unimportant and not even tangent to dealing with RussiaThat does not mean everything he does is bad. He saved the Siberian tiger. And I would much rather have Vladimir Putin than Leonid Brezhnev.