Keane (Manchester United) and Vieira (Arsenal) met more than a few times during their times on the pitch but they were not friends. Just meeting a few times between individuals or parties does not constitute friendship. Apply the same rule to entrepreneurs and politicians then you are stepping in to too many examples....
Do you have any evidence? What exactly makes you so sure he is a friend of Putin?
You can google Buterin and Putin and see that they have met a few times.
With the sactions inplace it's only possible to apply sanctions after ethereum 2.0 is inplace.
What does this statement actually mean?
Ethereum 2.0 will be protected by 1% of the supply. 1% of the money in the network will decide which transactions are valid or not. If angry miners go together and form a malicious staking pool with 1.5% of the network, they can block all the transactions or force the network to mutate. If a government agency does something similar, it's easy to create a killswitch of the network. This could happen if it is proven that North Korea, Iran or Russia use cryptocurrency to avoid sanctions.
Ethereum blockchain 1.0 is the safest bank in the world, and ethereum 2.0 is the opposite. Especially iun the few first months after the merge.