Why is the deprecated?

Answer 1

The proper way to achieve what you want is to declare that "V. V. Putin" is a proper noun, and define in CSS that such a proper noun should not be line breaked.

V. V. Putin

and in CSS you would define

.propernoun {
  white-space: nowrap;
}

Since... HTML is not about style, it is about content. Basically, this is the same as what the OP suggested, but the nowrap in class="nowrap" describes a presentational property in html which should be in the stylesheet.