Putin is garbage and I will celebrate the day he dies.
I've yet to encounter anyone defending Putin, but I've sure seen plenty of people try to twist criticisms of Ukraine and NATO's involvement with it into accusations of being a Putin-loving Russian disinformation bot. At least we get to squabble like idiots over foreign policy we have no influence over rather than find common ground over the remaining 90% of politics we probably have in common (and also have no influence over).
I don’t doubt that Putin defenders exist, though, just that they’re prominent enough to warrant near daily memes about how stupid tankies are ruining everything. Surely the bigger threat to the shared objectives of left wing politics is infighting.