re: #12 Bob Levin

The question is whether or not they’re undemocratic, and you can’t get around the equivalency here. One might defend them as undemocratic-but-justified in this specific situation. I would absolutely disagree, but I would at least understand this position. The point is, one would still acknowledge them as bad measures - maybe allegedly “necessary”, but bad and temporary, and undemocratic. What is being done here by Buck though is the defense of the very principle of limiting outside financing of NGOs as not anti-democratic. Thus the comparison to Putin is very apt, AFAIC.

PS: “Critics risk much more than financing” is hardly an argument relevant to this specific topic. That something worse could happen to critics is neither here, nor there. We’re discussing a particular issue. Financing of NGOs is one of the biggest hurdles in Russia, much bigger than “losing lives”, unless we’re talking about very specific topics like Chechnya, where one indeed risks much.