Putin is at a dangerous crossroads. Ceausescu, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Gaddafi are knocking on his regime’s door

The Russian dictator Putin is approaching that critical dangerous threshold when it is quite possible to talk about him repeating the fate of Nicolae Ceausescu, Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi. But Russia’s war with Ukraine plays a doubly contradictory role here.

Because on the one hand, the war has become a consolidation tool for Putin. It allows him to explain economic difficulties as an external threat, justify repression, mobilize patriotic rhetoric and subordinate society to the logic of a fortress under siege. On the other hand, the protracted war is gradually turning into a huge mechanism for the depletion of the resources of the Russian Federation. And the signs of overstrain of the Russian economy are becoming more and more pronounced.

However, when comparing Putin with Nicolae Ceausescu, Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi, it is worth bearing in mind that all these dictatorships at some point reached a state when the mechanisms created to preserve power began to work against the power itself.

The repressive apparatus ceased to guarantee loyalty, military policy became increasingly expensive, the economic model became less viable, and the elites began to think not about how to strengthen the ruler, but about how to survive his possible fall. This logic makes the current situation around Putin strategically important.

At the same time, it would not be entirely correct to talk about the inevitable collapse of the Putin regime right now. As of the fall of 2026, Russia is not on the verge of inevitable collapse, and Putin himself retains significant control over the state apparatus, security structures, the information space, and key elite groups.

The Kremlin regime is still able to finance the war, produce weapons, compensate for a significant part of military losses, and maintain the repressive system. Perhaps then it would be more correct to talk not about the imminent «end of Putin», but about the gradual narrowing of his space for strategic maneuver.

But the reality of Putin’s system is that war simultaneously strengthens and undermines it. After the start of the full-scale invasion, the Kremlin received an extremely powerful tool for political mobilization.

Then the war allowed to transfer society to a state of emergency, explain economic problems with sanctions and a «hostile environment», legitimize increased repression and present any dissent as assistance to an external enemy.

For a personalist dictatorship, this is an extremely effective mechanism. As long as there is an image of an existential threat, it is much easier for the regime to demand patience, sacrifice and obedience from society.

But this mechanism has a fundamental limitation: war must demonstrate a result. If the war does not end in victory, but cannot be stopped without political consequences, it turns into a trap. This is precisely what is increasingly evident in Russia.

Putin has built his legitimacy largely on the image of a state that has regained its strength after the chaos of the 1990s. His political contract with Russian society for decades has been something like this: the state provides order, income, and relative social stability, and citizens do not interfere in politics. The war has changed this contract. Now the state increasingly demands not passive loyalty, but material, human, and psychological participation in the war.

And it is at this point that a fundamental problem arises. The Russian system has been much better adapted to mobilizing resources than to restoring them. It can withdraw money from the economy, transfer enterprises to military orders, raise taxes, use state banks, redistribute property, and stimulate the military industry. But all of these mechanisms have a cumulative effect: they take resources from the civilian economy.

Now it is necessary to distinguish between the liquidity of the state and its economic viability. A totalitarian regime can finance a war for a long time, even at the cost of degrading the civilian economy. The question is how long it can do so without creating negative political consequences for itself?

A new factor has been added to this, Ukrainian attacks on Russian energy infrastructure. The problem for the Kremlin is not only the physical damage to individual refineries. A strike on oil refining creates a chain reaction: fuel shortages arise, prices rise, the state is forced to limit the export of petroleum products, and the domestic market requires increasing administrative intervention.

In 2026, Russia will already face a shortage of gasoline in some regions, while new forecasts predict a drop in oil production to the lowest level in about 17 years.

At this point, one of the most important laws of totalitarian regimes is manifested: economic problems become political not when money runs out, but when the state can no longer compensate all key social groups equally effectively.

As long as the Kremlin is still able to simultaneously finance the army, pay the military high compensation, support the security forces, subsidize strategic enterprises, and ensure an acceptable standard of living for the majority of the population, social stability will be maintained. But if it becomes necessary to choose who to give resources to, the system enters a qualitatively different phase.

Then questions begin to be asked not only by ordinary citizens, but also by governors, officials, businessmen, generals, and representatives of big capital. And this is precisely the moment that is much more dangerous for Putin than a drop in his popularity rating.

Dictatorships rarely fall because the population suddenly stops being afraid. Much more often, they begin to collapse when the elites stop believing in the ruler’s ability to guarantee the future of the system. And it is very important to understand this.

In this situation, a clear parallel can be traced with Ceausescu, Saddam, and Gaddafi. In each of these cases, the external strength of the regime long concealed internal fragility. As long as the security apparatus remained absolutely loyal, the system could appear unbreakable. But when part of the elite or the security forces decided that the ruler had become not an asset, but a source of danger, the speed of political change could be extraordinary.

Therefore, historical parallels with Ceausescu, Saddam, and Gaddafi should be taken as a warning for the future. Although it is not necessary that dictator Putin will repeat their fate one by one. Because Russia in 2026 is different from Romania in 1989, Iraq in 2003, or Libya in 2011.

The Russian totalitarian state has a nuclear arsenal, a much more powerful security apparatus, vast natural resources, and experience in adapting to sanctions and war. However, this does not guarantee that at some point some young colonels from Putin’s closest security circle will not make an attempt to arrest the dictator, secretly shoot him as a traitor to Russia, and then announce to the whole world that power has passed to the Provisional Government.

After all, despite the fact that the Security Service of the President of the Russian Federation (a structural unit of the Federal Security Service – FSO) is maximally secretive, the names of key officers and bodyguards from Putin’s closest circle are now known. These individuals directly accompany him on trips or are responsible for logistics and security of facilities.

What could happen if, for example, Andrey Lastovetsky, Nikita Belenky, Vladimir Timofeev, Maxim Stepanov, Yevgeny Golovkov take Putin to the nearest forest instead of his Moscow residence in Novo-Ogaryovo, and eliminate him there?

Or will Anton Myshenin, Sergey Moskalenko, Alexander Kupriyanov, German Shirokov, Mikhail Bogdanov, Andrey Annenkov, Alexander Gorelikov resort to the experience of eliminating Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and shoot Putin right in the Kremlin, on the eve of his meeting with the next president of some African country?

A hypothetical scenario in which key officers of the Russian Presidential Security Service or FSO officers dare to eliminate Vladimir Putin, either by taking him to the forest during a country trip, or by directly shooting him in the Kremlin by analogy with the murder of Indira Gandhi by his own bodyguards, would inevitably provoke a colossal political shock, instant destabilization of the system, and a brutal struggle for power within the Russian elites.

Since Putin’s regime is a deeply personalized totalitarianism, where all institutions, security forces, and oligarchic clans are locked directly into the figure of the leader, his sudden disappearance or physical destruction would destroy the current balance of power and create a legitimacy vacuum.

The Russian Federation would immediately find itself on the verge of an acute constitutional and administrative crisis. According to Russian law, in the event of the incapacity or death of the president, the duties of the head of state should be temporarily taken over by the head of government, but in real conditions, the security forces (FSB, Security Council, National Guard) and other interested groups would immediately begin behind-the-scenes negotiations or open forceful confrontation for real control over the Kremlin and the «nuclear suitcase».

The first reaction of the system to such an attempt within the FSO itself would be a regime of strict secrecy, an information blockade and the declaration of a state of emergency or the «Fortress» plan.

The organizers of the attempt and the perpetrators would be under enormous pressure, as parallel security structures, primarily the FSB, would immediately begin large-scale purges, arrests and investigations in order to identify possible customers, accomplices or foreign traces.

Even if the conspirators had a detailed plan to remove the dictator, it would be extremely difficult for them to keep the situation under control without the broad support of the army, intelligence services, and top political leadership, which increases the likelihood of internal armed clashes.

For the outside world, and in particular for the war against Ukraine and geopolitical stability, such a turn of events would mean a period of extreme unpredictability for Moscow.

A new transitional government or junta that would emerge from the ruins of the former Putin regime would be forced, first of all, to stabilize the domestic front and save the country from potential civil war or collapse, which could lead to temporary paralysis of the military command, a decrease in the combat capability of Russian troops in the occupied territories, or even attempts to start secret negotiations with the West to lift sanctions in exchange for certain concessions.

But, whatever happens, Nicolae Ceausescu, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Gaddafi are knocking on the door of the Putin regime. For modern Russia, this «knock on the door» is a warning: the more the regime tightens its screws, destroys alternatives and wages an aggressive war in Ukraine, the more destructive and unpredictable its inevitable collapse becomes. History proves that no special services, propaganda or army are able to provide a dictator with eternal power if he starts a war against time and his own people.

Nicolae Ceausescu, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi remind us that the historical finale of all personalist dictatorships is natural, inevitable and often tragic for the dictators themselves. And Putin, in no case, can be an exception to this rule.

After all, the experience of the fall of dictatorships shows that the tougher the regime and the longer the usurper holds absolute power, destroying state institutions, the higher the probability of a sudden, catastrophic and inglorious fall, when internal crises or external pressure finally destroy the illusion of his alleged omnipotence.