Will there be a coup d'état in Russia?

In an article at the end of May, the British professor Timothy Garton Ash, a keen expert on Russia, detected symptoms of weakness in Putin's regime. “No dictator lasts forever,” wrote Garton Ash, while also warning us that it would be imprudent to think that the end of the dictatorship is near.

However, some of the scenarios born from the Oxford professor's thoughts are indeed being confirmed: Putin has embarked on a desperate flight forward with increasingly intense rhythms. The bombings against Kyiv are becoming more frequent and more cruel, especially regarding the toll of civilian casualties. It is clear that the Kremlin would like to see the Ukrainian capital turned into a half-destroyed city that is beginning to empty out. The war, therefore, is currently shifting towards a more destructive side in Ukraine, and a more intimidating one towards broad areas of the European Union bordering Russia, victims of another war, the hybrid one.

“Only death or Russia can dispose of Putin,” proclaimed Timothy Garton Ash, like someone announcing who or what can get rid of Putin, but not when. However, the tyrant's actions tell us that his flight forward, filled with cruelty, evidences the hurry he is in: the hurry of an old and aging man, with twenty-six years in power, whose obsessive project of restoring Russia's imperial greatness is being left half-finished.

To achieve this, he has not hesitated to mutate the rivalry with the US into a kind of partnership, in the middle of which he and Trump present themselves as the best guarantee to crack Europe, and if necessary, destroy it. But the process has unexpected brakes and jolts such as the Iran war, which does not end because the American friend does not possess geopolitical and geostrategic calculation mechanisms like those of the old Soviet KGB agent. Some of the key figures in the Kremlin no longer trust that the Trump-Putin partnership can lead anywhere. They see it as far from reality, at least in the reality of the coming times. Hence the dictator's hurry, the bombings against Kyiv, and the drones against Eastern Europe.

The American-Jewish thinker Hannah Arendt wrote that “a totalitarian system can only be overthrown from within, not with a revolution, but with a coup d’état”. And a revolution in Putinist Russia is currently unimaginable with the people abducted by fear, ignorance, indifference, propaganda intoxication, and resignation. The democratic potential willing to stand up to Putin and express it in the streets would barely reach 25% of the Russian population. Thus, with revolt ruled out, we should measure how many rivals, adversaries, and enemies, with free entry to the Kremlin and military barracks, have Putin in their sights. And, added together, how much force they can deploy to achieve the harassment of the tyrant. One of the triggers for a conspiracy or a coup is – we must not lose sight of it – the economic factor: the persistence of Western sanctions as punishment for a war that in four and a half years has caused the flight of thousands of Russian citizens without even coming close to achieving the great goal announced in February 2022: the occupation of Ukraine.

Will there be a coup d’état in Russia or, at the very least, a plot by the establishment like the one that ousted Nikita Khrushchev from power in 1964? Timothy Garton Ash believes so, but he does not dare say when. The British professor does not stop reminding us what can hurt the Russian dictator the most: “The only language that Putin really understands is military and economic force exercised with political will”.