Interesting so Putin tried and failed, just goes to show this only moves forward if the common citizens allow it. Russians lack of respect for the law and govt probably aided in no small part by a hard life also making a lot of them less wimpy and less easily scared than other countries, meant they could not stream roll over them with tactics that worked in Australia and Canada. Russian peeps may have too much experience balancing risk/benefit analysis in order to survive and way way less trust in their media than other countries, this means it's harder to bs them. And they have less of a culture of doing tons of stuff just for politeness so that tactic won't go far either.