Can Vladimir Putin Be Toppled? Yes, And Here Is How?

 Here's how Vladimir Putin might be toppled - but could the next leader be worse? EDWARD LUCAS examines whether Ukraine invasion puts Russia's President on borrowed time

Those who know Vladimir Putin say he has an ugly fixation with a particularly gruesome scene from recent world history.

In October 2011, the bloodied figure of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi was dragged from the drain in which, like a rat, he had been hiding during the final days of his country's civil war.

Gaddafi begged for his life before he was brutalised with a bayonet and then shot repeatedly: an ignominious descent from his former pomp. Putin also knows that the last Russian tsar and his family were shot like dogs by Bolshevik revolutionaries in 1917. Little wonder that he obsesses over the footage of Gaddafi's end.

Yet as Putin's monstrous invasion of Ukraine stutters, some are asking: could the tide finally turn against the man who has ruled Russia in one form or another for 22 years? It sounds fantastical. Putin lives in a high-security bubble, in which visitors meet him only after exhaustive scrutiny. His paranoia is exemplified by the comically long table that he used to receive the visiting French president, Emmanuel Macron.

His journeys between his country palace and the Kremlin are along roads cleared of traffic and patrolled by snipers. A vast security apparatus is devoted to his personal safety, including military units on 24-hour standby and an independent spy network with complete power to snoop and bug at will. Yet for the first time in years, Russians are suddenly suffering severe economic pain. As sanctions bite, the rouble is in freefall. 

Cash machines are being emptied, dollars are running out and inflation is rocketing. Add to this the estimated 5,000 Russian dead in the assault on Ukraine in only a few days – with uncounted numbers of captured and wounded – and Putin's grip on power could soon start to look shaky. So how could he eventually be toppled?

Imagine, for example, that a daily sit-in begins in Moscow in the coming weeks by Soldiers' Mothers, a movement founded in 1989 to campaign against the brutal treatment of conscripts. These protests soon spread to other cities.  Heavy-handed tactics lead to bloodshed and pictures spread across Russia of a grandmother beaten and bloodied by police truncheons.

As outrage grows, numbers of protesters swell – and a police commander, the father of a teenage conscript killed in Ukraine, defies orders, removes his police helmet and joins the protesters, giving an impassioned plea that also goes viral on social media.Regional leaders – governors and mayors – start switching sides, too. In Moscow, crowds flock to Red Square, where inside the Kremlin, Putin – anxious to escape Gaddafi's fate – scuttles to a waiting helicopter that takes him to a fearful and lonely exile, initially in Belarus and perhaps later in China.

Or maybe it wouldn't be the mob storming the palace gates that ended Putin's rule. Instead, he could face a putsch by regime insiders.If public opinion was shifting against the dictator, many of his cronies would unhesitatingly depose or murder him to save their own skins.

FULL ARTICLE AT: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-10562685/EDWARD-LUCAS-Heres-Vladimir-Putin-toppled-leader-worse.html