Putin is not a dictator, but neither is he a democrat.
The world is full of countries whose political systems are in between outright dictatorships, as in North Korea, and pure democracies which have reached the height of perfection, as in the United States.
Russia is one of these, and so is Iran.
Is our good ally Singapore a dictatorship? They pretty regularly jail their outspoken dissidents, yet there is an opposition party -- the Workers Party -- which sometimes beats the long-time ruling party in elections, although not on a national level.
Even dictatorships spread out along a spectrum with respect to how much dissent they tolerate. China today is far freer than it was under Mao, and Russia is far freer than it was under Communism.
Actually, being a notional 'democracy' and officially tolerating dissenting voices can sometimes be worse than living in an outright dictatorship. In Latin America, many countries were technically 'democracies', but whenever an election put a government in power that the local military and the American government didn't like, the military would overthrow it, and murder a few thousand Reds or people who looked like they might be Reds.
Even today, dissenters or journalists who ask too many questions are likely to get a visit from a death squad in some democratic Latin American countries. Cuba is a dictatorship, but you're not going to end up in an unmarked grave in Cuba if you're a vocal critic of the government. Mexico is a democracy, but if you're an outspoken critic of the powers that be, you'd better have a good life insurance policy for your heirs.
Stop thinking in binary terms. And start thinking dialectically, comrades.
Look at (1) contradictions, and (2) change, driven by economic forces.
All of these countries have contradictory elements in their political arrangements and in their surrounding culture, and all of them are undergoing deep social changes, which are only sporadically reflected in their political superstructures.
The road to progress is to support those social changes, driven first of all by economics. Turning backward, illiterate, superstitious peasants into urban factory (ie. sweatshop) workers, and turning their children into educated office workers, is going to undermine the social basis for dictatorship. This won't happen overnight.
That's why globalization is good.