TOC, I just read your post, and I saw this:
But just the other day I read about a survey which found that even today, in 2008, people in western Europe still distrust George Bush more than they distrust Vladimir Putin of Russia. To most Americans, this probably sounds like a crazy way of looking at the world, but there is in fact a reason for it. Vladimir Putin has never started a war.
I live in western Europe, and I can tell you: most people in Europe don´t like George W. Bush and think he is an idiot and a very bad fake of Christian ideals. Do you know the song "Dear Mr. President"? It went straight up in the charts here... But distrust him? No, not really. We know he still is a democratically elected president, but he is abusing his powers. And he is too stupid to know what he is doing. That´s what the people I know think of him. And me too. *runs away and hides*
Putin is not democratically elected. He just pretends. He is building a position of power for Russia that is slowly coming near to the old Soviet Union, and he does it by commerce and money. He plays political power games and abuses the FSB to murder journalists who dare to criticize him or his puppet government (Medvedev). No, we don´t trust Putin at all. But we think we know he wouldn´t start a war against Europe or America, because he has nothing to win with that. The problem is: Russia is much nearer to Europe than America. We had it for a long time directly at our eastern borders, during the time of the German Democratic Republic (Eastern Germany) and the Cold War. So we had to build a relationship to Russia, and after the end of the Cold War there were friendly negotiations and even real friendship to people like Gorbatchov. But Putin? We have to accept him, but nobody I know does really trust him. And especially not our politicians. But none of them would ever say that aloud.
I don´t know where that survey came from, but it doesn´t sound to me as if the interviewers had asked the questions that way they get the real opinion behind a "Yes" or "No".
