“democracy” and its the country with the largest slave population in the world, the largest military, the lowest correlation between public support and policy, concentration camps on the border, gestapo actively hunting dissidents, a ruling duopoly that does everything it can to gerrymander and suppress the farce that passes for elections, active blacksites for political prisoners and harsh censorship. Alright bud.

If your criteria for “democracy” is “they will at least pretend to let the public have elections” then there’s quite a few countries you gotta acknowledge to be democracies - Including Russia.