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The rapid advance of Ukrainian forces over the past week has implications beyond the conflict in which they occurred. The future of Russian President Vladimir Putin and therefore the future of Russia itself is at stake.
Although it is early to assess the scope of the rout that has been described in many news reports over the past weekend, it makes clear that the Ukrainian army is superior in leadership tactics and morale to the Russian army. With continuing supplies from the West—primarily the United States—the Ukrainians can drive the Russians out of their country.
There is absolutely no chance for a negotiated settlement. The atrocities committed by the Russians in their few months of occupation—including the wanton destruction of schools, homes, and cities—makes a negotiated settlement with the Ukraine impossible. Just as the Allies in World War II could seek nothing but unconditional surrender from Germany and Japan, the Ukrainians cannot accept anything from the Russians except the unconditional surrender of all their claims to Ukraine.
If Russia is defeated, what then is the future of Putin? We do not know of any group in Russia that has the ability to remove him legally from power. Putin has seen to that. But when it becomes clear to the Russian people that Putin has lost this war and with it wealth, prestige, and human lives, it will be impossible for Putin to hold on to power.
Because there is no group with the legal authority to remove Putin, extra-legal actions by the Russian people will be necessary. Sufficiently large and widespread protests can make Putin's retention of power impossible. It has happened before.
In 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev opened the Soviet parliament to real elections. Boris Yeltsin, formerly a popular mayor of Moscow, was elected from a Moscow constituency. The following year, despite Gorbachev's and the communist party's opposition, Yeltsin ran for and was elected president of Russia. In this post, he increased his executive power and worked to dissolve the Soviet Union. In 1991, hardline members of the Communist Party staged a revolt against Gorbachev to restore the old Soviet Union. They were stopped by popular protests in major cities throughout the country and on Dec. 31, 1991, Communist Party control of Russia finally came to an end.
Fast forward to Dec. 31, 1999, and Yeltsin unexpectedly resigns as president and names Vladimir Putin as acting president. Putin then went on to win election as president in March 2000. Since then, Putin has consolidated his power and eliminated many of the organizations in the Russian government that could challenge him. The question now is how a badly weakened Putin could be removed from power when there are few government instrumentalities with authority to challenge him.
Unfortunately, the most likely course is chaotic, much like 1989, but there is at least one person—Alexei Navalny—who probably has a wide enough base of support in Russia to become the central figure of any effort to overthrow Putin. Navalny, who survived poisoning—almost certainly at the hands of Putin's thugs—in 2021, is currently in prison somewhere in Russia. He won praise by returning to Russia from Germany after treatment for the poisoning but was promptly imprisoned by Putin on trumped up charges. In a recent appeal of his nine-year sentence in a Moscow court, Navalny charged Putin with corruption, and claimed that the war in Ukraine is "based on lies." A defeat in Ukraine will be seen as proof of this charge.
If the Ukraine war goes as badly for Russia as current setbacks suggest, and if the Ukrainians—as expected—continue to be supported by the West and refuse to negotiate with Putin, mass protests in major Russian cities are to be expected, and ultimately, a change in the Russian government is likely to be the result.
Peter J. Wallison is a senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute. He was White House counsel and general counsel of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
