As long as he's favorable towards Western interests- Washington and Brussels have reason to prefer him over a strong patriotic pragmatist.
It's not to say that the West prefers racists, it's that the West prefers 2nd/3rd world leaders that bend over to them and they're willing to overlook their bad traits as long as they're willing to be puppets.
Improved dramatically since the Crimea fiasco. Hundreds of billions of dollars of economic value are being lost because Western European people are being pitted against Russia.
That's 100% true.
The fundamental problem between Western Europe and Russia is that Russia's neighboring countries are being absorbed into the European Union while Russia's trade relationship with Europe continues to be the same as Europe has with Latin American or African countries- that is to same in no way customized as it should be for a country that's practically in Europe.
I can share economic papers with you that detail how aggressive trade unions can be towards countries they blockade.
If every neighboring country of [European] Russia gets absorbed into the European Union and Russia remains excluded- that's hundreds of billions of economic losses for Russia.
I don't want to detail a competitive analysis table here, but here's a simple one:
-Ukraine gets accepted into the European Union:
- Russia offers bread for $8, gets taxed $4. The final cost to consumers is $12.
- Germany offers bread for $10, gets taxed $0 because of European Union co-membership. The final cost to consumers is $10.
What ends up happening is that Russia loses out economically because of political reasons.
That, at its core, paints a picture of the animosity that Russia has towards the political body that is the European Union, which is as the subset of Russia's greater conflict against the most powerful military alliance in the world, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.