About the things that you’ve mentioned—yes, he’s been doing that since the very beginning. I see that as a part of keeping his image.
As far as I know, even though in the modern world democracy often goes along with human rights and freedom of public speech and other things, it isn’t necessarily defined by them.
When I mentioned democratic institutions, I meant the institutions through which the government can reply to the needs of the people, like the administrative (!!!) courts, or local small town and neighbourhood parlaments, or special development programs. Some oppositioners do use them as a way to influence the government and make the lives of ordinary people better. They target mostly economical questions and public services improvement (like the “CityProjects”) and other things. I do respect those people, they’ve made a lot of good impact.
By democracy I mean the fact when people can discuss questions which are really important to them, like the wage sizes or the public services or education or other things like that with the government and work out solutions for those problems together.
But you are right, at a certain point the image of dictatorship becomes indistinguishable from the real thing. It’s probably happened now.
Calm down, they just mistranslated the name of the ship that went… okay, sorry, they mistranslated “Moskva”