Russia Ukraine war: Explainer – how would Putin’s presidency come to an end?

Vladimir Putin’s presidency has seen better days.

With Ukraine mounting a more convincing defence than predicted, Russia’s economy facing crippling sanctions and the country’s soldiers reportedly dying at extraordinary rates, murmurs of overthrow have started to bubble up and a potential successor has been named.

But for that to happen, Putin’s presidency would need to be brought to an end, which begs the question, what would it take for Russia to move past Putin?

The most likely outcome: He sticks it out

In what experts see as the most likely scenario, Putin would hold onto the presidency throughout the conflict in Ukraine and come out the other side.

In 2020 the Russian President extended previous term limits ensuring he could hold onto the presidency for longer without overtly breaking any laws, making it difficult for him to be removed.

He is also likely to win elections, given he has silenced dissent, in the process jailing the most likely opposition candidate Alexei Navalny after the opponent survived a series of dramatic assassination attempts.

It is also well documented that recent Russian elections have been fraudulent.

The next Russian election is due to be held in 2024, when Putin will be 72 years old. The constitutional changes, assuming he wins that election and the next, allow him to stay in power until 2036, when he will be 84.

What happens then is left up to speculation.

One of Putin’s former key advisers, Vladislav Surkov, has suggested Putin facilitate a peaceful transition to a hand-picked successor.

The Economist in 2020 assessed this was unlikely, saying: “Putin’s constitutional coup and his growing reliance on repression rather than patronage or propaganda raises the cost of challenging him, reduces the chances of an orderly transfer of power and increases the risk of violence in Russia.”

How long could Putin last?

Former US National Security Council official and prominent Russia expert Fiona Hill, who testified in the first of former US President Donald Trump’s impeachment hearings, recently noted to Politico that Putin may not have many years left to live.

“Putin’s not looking so great, he’s been rather puffy-faced. We know that he has complained about having back issues. Even if it’s not something worse than that, it could be that he’s taking high doses of steroids, or there may be something else. There seems to be an urgency for this [invasion] that may be also driven by personal factors,” she said.

“He may have a sense that time is marching on — [he has been in office for] 22 years, after all, and the likelihood after that kind of time of a Russian leader leaving voluntarily or through elections is pretty slim.”

The other option: Putin loses grasp on power

The combined cost of war and unified sanctions is weighing heavily on Russia, wrote Nikolai Petrov, senior research fellow at British-based think tank Chatham house.

“It is … the first time in Putin’s Russia that there have been so many individual and collective protests against Kremlin actions.”

Despite draconian curbs on the flow of information, Petrov said Putin no longer enjoys an overwhelming, majoritarian support.

“But public support for the Kremlin’s military adventure, which is far from unconditional even now, will decline rapidly and steadily as the high price becomes clear, both in human lives and the complete up-ending of normal life by the state,” Petrov wrote.

Hill echoed these thoughts to Politico.

“The way it works with Russian elections, he actually has to put on a convincing show that demonstrates that he’s immensely popular and he’s got the affirmation of all the population,” she said.

“Behind the scenes, it’s fairly clear that there’s a lot of apathy in the system, that many people support Putin because there’s no one else.”

But still, since Putin won’t be voted out, the most likely way for him to be removed from office, experts say, is through assassination.

Australian National University visiting fellow and expert in communist and post-communist studies Dr Leonid Petrov said that such an operation was most likely to come from those closest to Putin – the security services.

“The closest to Putin is the so-called Federal Protective Service, which is deliberately designed to protect the president and his office. They are in close co-operation with the FSB [the successor to the KGB,” Dr Petrov told news.com.au.

Noting that Putin seems to stand closely with women more frequently than with men, and citing the President’s reputation as a “womaniser”, Dr Petrov suggested a hypothetical assassin may be a woman.

“I believe that if there is an assassination attempt, that might come from a female. Maybe a member of his family, his mistress, his daughter, his ex wife – somebody who knows him and could actually get close to him,” he said.

“The possibility [of assassination] is increasing.”

Hill said Putin is also “extremely paranoid” about assassination attempts from foreign powers.

“Any kind of loose talk about somebody taking him out, regime change – he believes we’re in that business anyway. He looks at what the US has done, he says it openly all the time – in Libya, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and many other places where we’ve intervened and he looks at that and thinks, I’m not going to let that happen here in Russia. He’s extremely paranoid about this,” she told NBC News.

Putin recently ordered a thousand of his personal staff replaced out of fear for personal safety, reported The Daily Beast.

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