If you’d read the article, you’d have seen that those complaints didn’t come from Westerners, but rather from Russians who complained about e.g. his anti immigrant stance, equating immigrants to „cockroaches“ or dressing as a dentist and making a metaphor that immigrants were a pain that needs to be removed. He hasn’t distanced himself from these statements. Therefore Amnesty International’s Moscow office reluctantly rescinded his “prisoner of conscience“ status.
You pretend like nationalist authoritarianism is a phenomenon exclusive to Russia, or like this would be some kind of special case. No it is not. I come from a place with equally rotten politics and we have people being marked as terrorists nowadays who were pushed as freedom fighters by the Westerns back in the day because they were against their enemy. The Americans conveniently ignored all their fascistic tendencies or said something like you do about having to understand the specific culture, etc. to justify supporting those people. And now they’re backing someone else to get rid of the people they once supported, again ignoring anything that doesn’t fit into their narrative. If you now think you know where I’m from, believe me you don’t, this is such a common trope it has happened in too many places. Your situation is not unique and if you support a fascist you get fascism.
The Enemy of my enemy is my friend I guess? Maybe a lot of people who don’t want to hear it or Russians who don’t care about his racism, idk.