The sick joke behind all this western outrage over "Russian oligarchs" is that Clinton White House literally created & celebrated Russia's oligarchy in the 1990s. Difference is Yeltsin oligarchs had real political power; today, they're billionaires without political control
A big reason why the US/UK turned against Putin was because he started jailing Russian oligarchs who challenged his power. By definition Russia's billionaires aren't really oligarchs anymore—and that violates our neoliberal order
This doesn’t make Putin a leftist anti-neoliberalism ally. His economic system is still largely Yeltsin’s system, with neoliberalism’s key feature: inequality. But Putin’s version has worked much better for Russians & worse for westerners than Yeltsin’s—so we have to crush it
