My answer

The criticism personally offends him and he cannot tolerate it.  Surely you have known people like this in conversation [and department politics?], and they didn’t even have any guns or nuclear weapons or polonium behind them.

That’s with help from Natasha.  Here was Bryan’s question:

Putin is popular…what’s the point of persecuting the opposition?…if he’s really so popular, why risk looking like a paranoid despot?