I don’t recall saying anything about all Russians supporting Putin.

In any case, Putin is more of a symptom than the cause of Russia’s problems. They seem to be completely unable to produce systems of government that aren’t psychopathic and incredibly brutal; this has been going on for centuries now, Putin is not some sort of one-off anomaly.

Whether the majority of the populace has been brainwashed or not is in some ways irrelevant. It’s the same as with “western” conservatives: many of them have been brainwashed, but when they literally want to murder me for who I am it’s inconsequential to me how they arrived at their ideology. Compare them to eg. the Nazis; many were brainwashed but feeling empathy towards your concentration camp guards wasn’t going to get you out of the camp