Does Putin really hate Democracy?

Robert Kagan in the WaPo:

Putin's aggression against Georgia should not be traced only to its NATO aspirations or his pique at Kosovo's independence. It is primarily a response to the "color revolutions" in Ukraine and Georgia in 2003 and 2004, when pro-Western governments replaced pro-Russian ones. What the West celebrated as a flowering of democracy the autocratic Putin saw as geopolitical and ideological encirclement.

I think Kagan, both here and in his recent (and very good) TNR essay (I haven't read the book version), places too much emphasis on ideological differences between the United States and Russia/China. I don't think the "ideological encirclement" matters as nearly as much as the geopolitical one. If Georgia was a democracy that hated the United States, I don't think Putin would be invading it. To extent that Georgia's form of government matters, it's only to the United States/NATO, where many would believe we have more of a duty to protect a democracy.