Yes Yeltsin was far from perfect but he stood up to KGB remnants that wanted , at a minimum, to bring back elements of the old USSR, at least in Russia. That alone secures his place in history.

Tsar Vladimir the Short, in contrast, has risen primarily by staging wars against his neighbors. The second Chechen war may well have been started for example by the wave of attacks on apartment buildings in Moscow that many now attribute to the FSB and by the wave of assassinations of the more moderate Chechen leaders that were definitely done by the FSB.

Meanwhile if you remove the immediate causes of his Ukrainian folly you see a consistent pattern of Putin creating “frozen conflicts” all around his borders. The implicit strategy is worship me, or thousands of your people will die by my little green men.

In contrast, look what he had done with the completely fortuitous rise of oil prices between 1999 and 2012? Did he reignite former Russian leadership in the hard sciences? Did he rebuild a crumbling infra-structure? Did he rebuild key industrial might to prevent Russia from being a second rate resource provider for the real industrial powers? Did he create a new civil society that Yeltsin, alas left incomplete? No to all of these. He pushed out the remnants of the Kremlin’s economic reformers, allowed his Siloviki corrupt friends to take over industry after industry, and accumulated vast amounts of wealth for them, and it is widely reputed for him as well, meanwhile encouraging capital and brain flight and appeasing the Russian masses with staged fights against far weaker peaceful neighbors.

What a cynical and truly evil man.

He may be, by Russian standards charismatic, but he has in my opinion greatly accelerated the further decline of the Russian people, who under a different leader could today have been challenging modern Europe for economic leadership