It actually seems that these two opinions are the only ones the commentators have on Putin. Either you think Putin is evil, expansionist, and wants to restore Russia to its former imperial glory or you think the West needs to back off and stop making Putin feel threatened by expanding the Western European alliance eastward.
From a moral point of view, I don't understand how the United States can condemn Putin when he is doing what we did under the Monroe Doctrine for over a 100 years. We've never had any hesitation about asserting our power and influence in what we consider our rightful sphere of influence.
The opinions on Putin cut across the traditional division between left and right. In one camp, there are the liberal interventionists and conservatives who tend to see this as a moral issue where the United States has to confront the growing scourge Putin represents; and in the other camp, realists who think we're going to have to live with Putin's imperial adventures as long as he doesn't stray too far from his borders.
Here's columnist William Pfaff, unfairly ignored by the American media, supporting the realist point of view--
He sees Russian intervention in Ukraine as the result of
a bungled and essentially American attempt to annex Ukraine to NATO and the European Union, and to undermine the domestic political position of President Putin — which all has gone badly and dangerously wrong...
It is the latest (and probably last) step in a foolish American and European betrayal of the promise given to Mikhail Gorbachev by President George H.W. Bush, at the time of the unification of Germany, that if the Soviet Union agreed to a newly united Germany’s assuming the Federal Republic’s existing place as a member of NATO, no NATO troops would be stationed in what formerly had been the Communist German Democratic Republic.
John Mearsheimer, a leading exponent of realism in foreign policy and an academic at the University of Chicago, wrote an article entitled,
"Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault."
the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West...
Putin’s pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West had been moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly.
In the opposite corner,
Yale historian Timothy Snyder who argues that Putin is pursuing a pro-Slavic, proto-fascist ideology with ambitions that threaten the rest of Eastern Europe.
To prove the resemblance between Hitler and Russia, he quotes Putin himself:
Speaking before an audience of Russian historians at the Museum of Modern Russian History, Putin said: “The Soviet Union signed a non-aggression agreement with Germany. They say, ‘Oh, how bad.’ But what is so bad about it, if the Soviet Union did not want to fight? What is so bad?”
He goes so far as to say in some ways Putin is worse than Hitler:
But there is an important difference between Stalin in 1939 and Putin in 2014. One can at least credit Stalin for attempting to resolve a real problem: Hitler did indeed intend to destroy the Soviet Union. In allying with Hitler he compromised his ideology and made a strategic mistake, but he was certainly responding to a real threat. Putin, on the other hand, had no European enemy. Without any apparent cause, in 2013, for the first time, the Russia government designated the European Union as an adversary. In its media and indeed in official foreign policy pronouncements it has characterized the European Union as “decadent,” in the sense of about to disintegrate.
What is to be done?
Here's the rub because as far as I can tell liberals feel there is not much the West can do. Arming the Ukrainians is too risky and potentially explosive. The consensus seems to be deterrence and sanctions. Which may mean whatever you think about Putin, there's little we can do to stop him.