In fact, people in the US are only free to yell at the American leadership in Soviet jokes. A
case in point was this June in Los Angeles, when a police officer knocked a protesting woman with a megaphone to the ground and then hit her.
Nice try, but it's quite clear from the video that the protester was tackled for getting too close to the moving vehicles, not for yelling. As evidenced by many other protesters along the street doing just fine.
to bring down any protest moods in society.
Ok then. Suppress any protests in the country - that's freedom in Russia. Tackle someone somewhere in the US getting for breaching the security perimeter - that's oppression. Am I getting this right?
Do you not consider that since 2014 the Kiev government has been bombing Russian-speaking residents of Ukraine in the Donbas and as a result of these attacks 14,000 people have died?
14 thousand people died in total during the 8 years of conflict, most within the first year. That includes those killed by the terrorist ponzi republic sponsored by the KGB. The conflict was essentially frozen (~20-25 deaths per year) before Putin decided to invade and killed many more Donbas residents in the few months than the alleged "bombing" in 8 years.
I think I'm gonna stick with Putin being the bad guy.
When joining the EU or NATO, referendums are held in countries or everything is decided only by the leadership of these countries? Because Sweden, for example,
refused to hold a referendum on NATO membership, although this directly affects the citizens of this country.
You still don't get the whole democracy thing, do you? Unlike in Putin's Russia, "leadership" in democratic countries doesn't exist in its own separate universe. They get elected. Also if a referendum is required by the constitution, it will happen, and many countries have other ways to trigger it (e.g. gather a certain number of signatures). As evidenced by some countries having them with regards to NATO (Slovakia was one IIRC).