Putin is obsessed with this idea of “legitimacy”: Assad is legitimate to him, Yanukovych is legitimate, the Duma is legitimate, and so on. But this is not really legitimacy at all — it is merely formal legality, as judged by Assad and Yanukovych themselves.
There is an excellent column in Vedomosti about this today. Deputies with stolen mandates can pass whatever idiotic laws they want and ban people they dislike from running for office (people like me, for example). That may be formally legal, but it is not legitimate at all — because the support here comes not from the people, but from the GAS Vybory election system (Russia’s state automated vote-counting system), the repressive apparatus, and censorship.
It may seem like the column is about Syria, but in Russia it reads as though it is not really about Syria at all.