I'd be delighted if someone in the Russian elite knocked off Putin, but there is no certainty that even his removal would be the remedy for the current situation, let alone a long term solution. Would Hitler's assassination have yielded a more pliable Himmler? It seems to me that the dissent in Russia is more in the way of people who are upset that Putin is losing, not that he went to war in the first place. They want a bigger war, more brutality, fewer limits yet. It reminds me of the famous opinion poll during Vietnam in which the majority of Americans said they were in favor of ending the war. But when asked, the majority of them wanted to end it by winning it.
Russia needs a democratic revolution, not a coup from above. Something more like the Orange Revolution or the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine--or perhaps a whole series of such revolutions. That is pie-in-the-sky at the moment, but one can hope. For the broad Russian public to get behind regime change would require a degree of anger and disillusionment that propaganda could not efface. Perhaps if Putin instituted a draft, the casualties increase as Ukraine gets better and better at war, the Russian economy goes deeper into freefall, and more and more territories are lost to the point that the war seems completely hopeless. And while it all seems highly unprobable, Russia has shown the capacity to overthrow out-of-touch and irrational autocrats before. Down with Czar Putin.
Russia needs a democratic revolution, not a coup from above. Something more like the Orange Revolution or the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine--or perhaps a whole series of such revolutions. That is pie-in-the-sky at the moment, but one can hope. For the broad Russian public to get behind regime change would require a degree of anger and disillusionment that propaganda could not efface. Perhaps if Putin instituted a draft, the casualties increase as Ukraine gets better and better at war, the Russian economy goes deeper into freefall, and more and more territories are lost to the point that the war seems completely hopeless. And while it all seems highly unprobable, Russia has shown the capacity to overthrow out-of-touch and irrational autocrats before. Down with Czar Putin.