Very easy to be popular when you control the media and can just have the opposition poisoned. Stalin was (and to some people still is!) overwhelmingly popular.
Its amazing to me that Americans are so eager to point out Russia's poisoning of dissenters, yet choose to clearly ignore the chemical lobotomy that has been dished out to Assange while he is in one of the Wests' most heinous of all torture chambers.
HM Prison Belmarsh? I’m no fan of the U.K. government, especially because they didn’t even bother to tell Sweden he had been removed from the embassy even though Sweden’s existing case was why he was in there in the first place, but Belmarsh is neither a torture chamber nor even remotely comparable to e.g. Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
Nils Melzer has severely criticised the USA for Gitmo, and also “cautiously” welcomed a British court’s refusal to expedite assigned the USA specifically on the grounds that the USA is likely to be much worse.
While Nils Melzer is critical of Assange’s treatment by U.K. authorities, the behaviour he criticised also includes the fact they were not willing to ignore him if he left his self imposed imprisonments in the embassy. Even with the most hostile interpretation I can manage (and I really don’t have a reason to like the U.K. government even before Johnson started doing Nixon impressions), Belmarsh prison, where Assange is currently being detained, is not even close to being on the list of the “Wests' most heinous of all torture chambers”.
The people always get the governments they deserve.
Putin hasn't been removed - democratically or by violent coup - simply because he is popular with the people who have chosen to be ruled by him.
This doesn't align with the two minutes hate narrative that the West want to use in order to justify its direct interference in Russian democracy - in a sovereign country - so a lot of noise is made to occlude this fact and justify the usurpation of Russian politics.