The problem is that "his own" are like him. Like Gaddafi, he has assembled a cabinet of weaklings and a military command full of failures, advanced, not by competance but how much fealty they have shown. If he goes, they all go. Like Libya, and Syria, the end doesn't come from the centre; its not a Moscow White House citizen's protest as in 1993, it will come from the edges. The Libyan uprising started not in Tripoli, but in Benghazi. Syria disintegrated from the hinterland inwards. Putin, through his stupidity, has contrived the situation that the West has been trying to avoid for years; the collapse of the Russian Federation. Right from the start, Putin selectively mobilised non-ethnic Russians, from the far east, from the Caucasus, in some attempt to spare people in Moscow and St Petersberg. The widows, the orphans in the Far East aren't getting the compensation payments, the free Ladas, the kitchen appliances they were promised. The life of a Russian in the east is very different from Moscow. And the Russian Federation isn't really a unitary state; its a federation, but a federation formed by the collapse of an empire, rather than the coming together of like minded Oblasts. It was enforced by Russian colonisers who were fearful of being ruled over by non-Russians. Chechenya basically only remains part of Russia through bribery. Truckloads of tribute are paid to Kadyrov, which funds his ostentatious lifestyle and his literal Gucci army (they wear boots by Gucci). If that money stops.... Putin repeatedly whines about the collapse of the Soviet Union as a terrible thing. The USSR was a rotten institution, like the 3rd Reich. The way it went was probably the best case scenario; relatively bloodlessly, and the nukes didn't end up in the hands of loons. But it left the old Russian Empire, now called the Russian Federation, behind. Putin's actions are contriving the worst possible outcome; Russia dissolving into a series of squabbling microstates, and the loons getting the nukes. The West has been consistent; Russia must not succeed in its expansionist ambitions driven by a man who actually doesn't understand history, but Russia must also not lose such that it destroys itself. But the West underestimated how dysfunctional the Russian government had become; that the Russian government had ceased governing for the betterment of the Russian people, but instead was working for the oligarch. Putin himself might fall out of a window, but that will be followed by a Kremlin doubling down on its policies, even more incompetently, and various factions try to out-Putin each other. The Joker is China. Its not in China's interest for Russia to completely dissolve (China is also full of non-Han minorities), but on the otherhand, China wouldn't mind Russia being chopped into bits, with new leaders more amenable for China's way of business, which is basically not rocking the boat. Plus a bit of border adjustment, because basically the Chinese hate the Russians, and now the boot is on the other foot. The Russians might think of themselves as Eurasians, but China just thinks of the Slavs as just another group of colonial Europeans.
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