It's worth pointing out that there are very few countries in the world today that don't make pretensions of being democratic, and painting Putin as wanting to discredit democracy is about as ridiculous as saying that the various international terrorist organizations target America because they hate freedom. Obviously it's hard to look at Russia and think it anything other than an oligarchic dictatorship (the dominance of United Russia in all levels of government, the domestic political and media suppression, the farce that was Putin and Medvedev playing musical chairs to keep to the letter of the constitutional term limits, etc) but that doesn't mean that the appearance of democracy isn't important. Even the DPRK and China hold elections and maintain ideological commitments to "democracy" in a highly warped sense.
And has been pointed out, "democracy" as structured in the US is looking daily like an increasingly lurid trainwreck, and maintains only marginally more responsiveness to public opinion than that of many authoritarian regimes. The critical difference for the US is that the government doesn't engage in nearly as much active suppression, it has a more passive population with access to more convincing outlets for political theater, and there are fewer glaring social and economic problems that spur unrest.