Could Putin Actually Be Overthrown?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
On Tuesday, July 7th, the wait is over.
Operation Triumph comes to Telemundo. Thousands answered the call. This is my destiny. But only a few will arrive at the Zero Gala. Here, everyone is ready, here is the level. Who will be the chosen ones? I'm going to win my place at the Zero Gala. Discover it in the great premiere of Operation Triumph, USA, Tuesday, July 7th, by Telemundo and Peacock.

**Mike Baker** (0:42)
It's Tuesday, the 30th of June. Look at that. We have made it to the end of yet another month. Welcome to The Presidents Daily Brief. I'm Mike Baker, your eyes and ears on the world stage and what a stage it is. Now, here at the PDB, we thought we'd try something just a bit different over the next couple of days.
Sort of a respite from the chaos of the Iran conflict, the grinding brutality of the Ukraine conflict and the other important events that typically make up the news cycle. Instead of focusing on the day's headlines over the next couple of days, we're stepping back from that daily news cycle just again for a short while to take a closer look at some of the most important geopolitical challenges currently facing the world. Think of it as a series of intelligence briefings, examining the major players, the underlying dynamics and the questions that don't always fit neatly into a traditional daily news program. And for today, well, today, we're starting off with a question about a key world leader that's been asked repeatedly now for more than two decades. And that question is, could Vladimir Putin ever be overthrown? It's a question that tends to resurface whenever Russia faces a crisis, after military setbacks in Ukraine or after economic sanctions or following political unrest. And perhaps most notably, it was asked after Wagner group chief Evgeny Prokofiev launched his short-lived march toward Moscow back in 2023, which of course ended with Prokofiev mysteriously dying in a plane explosion. It's hard to imagine who could have orchestrated that. Each time after each crisis, speculation follows. Is Putin finally vulnerable? Is his grip on power slipping? Could someone inside the Kremlin be preparing to move against him?
But answering those questions requires us to first understand how Putin has managed to stay in power for so long. Because despite wars, sanctions, the occasional but short lived political opposition and internal isolation, Vladimir Putin remains one of the most durable leaders of the modern era.
So today we're going to examine the forces that keep him in power, the threats that could one day undermine his rule and what a real effort to remove Russia's president might actually look like.
The first thing to understand is that most people ask the wrong question when they think about how dictators or strongmen fall. We tend to assume that authoritarian leaders are removed when ordinary people become angry or fed up enough. That public frustration eventually reaches a breaking point and millions take to the streets and the regime collapses under its own weight. Huzzah! Now occasionally that does happen, but more often, well, it doesn't. In fact, history suggests that dictators rarely lose power because of the people at the bottom of the system. They lose power when they lose the support of the people at the top. And that's particularly true in Vladimir Putin's Russia. Putin doesn't need to be universally popular. He doesn't need every Russian citizen to support him. He doesn't even need most Russians to believe everything they hear on state television, which by the way, they don't. What he does need is the continued loyalty or at least the continued cooperation of a relatively small group of people who sit at the center of the Russian state. And that includes the security services, the military leadership, powerful oligarchs, senior government officials, regional political bosses, the people who control the levers of power. As long as those groups remain intact, public dissatisfaction is largely manageable. And Putin understands this better than perhaps any world leader alive today. And that's because he came of age watching another seemingly permanent regime collapse, of course, the Soviet Union. When the Soviet system imploded in 1991, it wasn't because ordinary citizens suddenly discovered they were unhappy. It was because the institutions that held the state together stopped functioning. Political elites fractured, security structures weakened, economic problems multiplied, and confidence in the leadership evaporated. The lesson that Putin took from that experience was simple, never allow competing centers of power to emerge. And for the past quarter century, he's built his entire political system around that principle.
Now, Putin's background is important here. Before entering politics, he spent years as an officer in the KGB, the Soviet Union's intelligence and security service, of course. He was stationed in East Germany when communist governments across Eastern Europe began collapsing. He watched crowds gather. He watched governments fall, and perhaps most importantly, he watched institutions falter and turn on the system.