I've always understood Zhyrinovsky as Putin's willing stooge to keep truly radical Russian nationalism as the stuff of clowns in the public eye. Nobody would take it seriously if someone like Zhyrinovsky was the face of the movement, meaning Putin can keep that fairly dangerous undercurrent in Russian society under control.
It also interests me that his comments regarding women in the Maidan protests are the ones that might "end his career", not when he said that all Chinese and Japanese should be deported from the Russian Far East or when he expressed his concern about all the "blacks and hispanics" in the USA while on a visit there and called for the preservation of the White Race. Or when he said that Chechnya should have been nuked, or when he said the Baltic countries should be invaded and forcibly annexed and turned into nuclear waste dumping grounds, or when he said that Romania doesn't exist, or when he said nuclear bombs should
be dropped in the Atlantic ocean to flood Britain, or when he said...Yeah, all those remarks did was make him Vice Chairman of the State Duma for over 10 years.
I remember that guy from the 90s. He has said worse things IIRC, and while it didn't really hurt his political career, he is much less relevant today than he used to be. In the 90s the media here were very worried about him and he is one important reason why Putin was seen as a much more agreeable alternative.
One of his other functions for Putin and the rest of the oligarchy is to act as a boogeyman for the West so Putin will always look like the agreeable alternative, no matter what he's doing.
Separatists in Sloviansk are keeping 13 OSCE observers hostage, they claim they were NATO spies (apparently some of them are military personnel, which led them to believe that) and treat them as POWs.
The observers are not part of the current diplomatic OSCE mission in Ukraine, but belong to an unrelated OSCE mission about military transparency and thus were accompanied by Ukrainian military.
Germany (where most of the observers are from) and Russia (also an OSCE member) demand their immediate release, but the separatists want a prisoner exchange. (link in German)
This doesn't look like it's going to end well.