What Putin is after is annihilation: reducing the population of gays down to zero: by killing some, encouraging others to leave, and intimidating the rest into invisibility.
In the year 1900, there were roughly 5.5 million Jews in Russia, some of whom had been there ince the year 400 or before.
Today, there are 280,000 Jews in Russia, most of them non-practicing.
A gay Russian friend of mine (who has to be entirely closeted and assumes he will have to remain in the closet till he dies) said that he thinks Putin is using the gays as a scapegoat because the Russian people are bored with the Chechen situation. He said that when Putin realized he could no longer get the people riled up by blaming things on the Chechens, the gays were the only other group that could be vilified.
It seems very Orwellian--"there must always be an enemy!"--but it's actually deadly serious. Along the way, gay people will be beaten, bloodied, have acid poured on their heads, shot, maimed, killed--until there are no gay people left in Russia.
And then they will find another scapegoat.
It's the Russian way.