His name is not Vlad, it's a familiar form of a completely unrelated name. If you want to demonstrate contempt by using a familiar form, use Vova.

It sounds about the same as if I used something like "Joe" to refer to a William.

Everyone knows who is meant by "Vlad Putin".

The purpose of calling Vlad Putin "Vlad Putin" is to show disrespect towards Vlad Putin, which is better accomplished by making the diminutization less linguistically accurate.

It doesn't actually achieve that, it just makes you look like an ignorant Westerner. Similar to all the "-ski" stuff that Americans, for some reason, seem to believe is indicative of Russian.

If you want to troll Putin, call him Vovochka.

Putin is not in fact the intended audience, so the diminutive should be tailored to the audience, not to Putin.

Kind of like calling him "Putain", or "Poo-tin", which are also not his name.

Well, If you can't win in the battlefield, I think this is a good cope mechanism.

NATO should have stayed with their time-honored tradition of bombing the shit out of sheep-herders with AKs instead of starting a proxy war with Russia.

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I couldn't possibly care less what that genocidal maniac wants to be called, or what the "proper" way to insult him is.

The Vlad part is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlad_the_Impaler

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