Charles Krauthammer pointed out recent crimes likely committed by the Putin’s regime in Russia, and he argued that the trend of mildness toward Putin in the West harms our values and our interests:

This is a malign regime. And the statement by the White house was a fairly mild one. But think about what just happened in the last couple of days: Last Thursday a Kremlin opponent who took refuge in Ukraine — he’s against the Ukraine operation — was shot dead in the street in broad daylight. Two days earlier, a week ago on Tuesday, another critic of the regime who represents the Magnitsky family, the one of another guy who died on orders of the Kremlin, he falls out of a four-story window, according to the regime, while installing a hot tub in the fourth-floor apartment. Now I don’t know about Russia, but in the United States, installing hot tubs is not a known cause of defenestration, so this is a little bit suspicious.

And we have a president who talks about his guy, who is a killer — we are talking about Putin here. He kills his opponents, there are at least a dozen who are well known, and speaks about it flippantly. It doesn’t mean you start a world war with this guy, it doesn’t mean that you have to oppose everything he does, but this is a regime of which the Trump administration has spoken very mildly, and I think it is an affront to our values. It’s also against our interests. There are Europeans like the leading candidate for president in France who was just in Moscow; she smoked a peace pipe with Putin, she spoke glowingly of him. This is Russia extending its influence in a way that will be very much detrimental to us and to the West.