First of all a little bit about me. I am on public record as correctly predicting the results of the last four British general elections, the Brexit Referendum and the US presidential election of Donald Trump. In the case of Boris Johnson’s remarkable post Brexit election win I had the Tories down for a 50 seat majority. That was my public proclamation. In private I thought 80, which it turned out to be, but I was so horrified at how absurd that sounded at the time that I toned it down a bit in order not to look stupid. So what I say here should be seen in the light of what is not a bad record.
This post has been going over and over in my mind for some time. In my house it is a sort of joke - “Titus, when are you going to do something about Putin?” It is only now that I feel I have a predictive handle on it. And this is why:
A recent event, the assassination of a Putin ally by an explosive device, apparently given to him as a gift by a female, is a marker point in the evolution of this world crisis. Daria Trepova, a Russian national, has been arrested and questioned about the assassination of a Kremlin crony, Vladlen Tatarsky, in a St Petersburg cafe. Before the killing she had handed Tatarsky the gift of a bust of himself that in fact contained enough explosive to kill him and injure many others.
'Spiders are eating each other in a jar,' opines Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian Presidential advisor. 'The question of when domestic terrorism would become an instrument of internal political fight was a matter of time.'
This is the first time that an assassination on Russian soil has been directly attributed to someone who is a known anti-war activist. It is a turning point, in much the same vein as the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the casus belli for The Great War.
This needs some explanation over and above Podolyak’s wry assessment. Up to now opposition to the war in Ukraine has been more or less successfully repressed. Protesters are scooped up, given a good going over and you never hear about them again. The high profile ones are either in jail or have carelessly committed suicide by falling out of a window or stabbing themselves several times. Or both at once. The number of former Putin cronies or critics who have met violent ends recently is substantial and growing. It is a source of puzzlement to me that those who are left are not thinking, “It’s going to be him or me and frankly I would prefer it if it was him”. But this one is different. According to the BBC Ms Trepova was arrested at an anti-war rally in February of 2022. She appears to be a self-declared rebel. More importantly a rebel with a cause who is not afraid to speak out and, act.
She did not kill Putin. You might be thinking, ‘thank you Titus for that clarification’. But I think she did. I believe she has set in motion a course of events that will lead directly and inevitably to his death.
I have already cited the obvious precedent for this but there is another which while underlining my point that single ‘black swan’ events can change world affairs, they can also encompass the law of unintended consequences. You may have heard of Marinus van der Lubbe. If not you will certainly be aware of the burning down of the Reichstag by an arsonist, which led to a chain of events that saw Hitler remove all civil protections and liberties and finally the Enabling Act gave him carte blanche to rule by decree.
So here is my first prediction. It is really common sense. Putin will use the Tatarsky killing as a reason to clamp down even further on dissent. Of course, Putin is at the stage of moral decay where he could do this anyway but you will have noticed that there always has to be a justification for his tyranny even if, as in most cases, it is a specious one. The consequences are obvious. There will be a trial. The narrative will be a Kremlin narrative. There will be an attempt to link Trepova to Ukraine. It is not that she will be found guilty - that is pretty much a given - but what happens next. Will more protesters take to the streets? Will it embolden other lone actors or groups? That is likely, but the overarching factor will be Vladimir Putin himself. He is already paranoid. This is event is hardly an emollient. St Petersburg is 400 miles from Moscow but in political and demographic terms it is much closer. Too close for Vlad I think. It is, after all, his home town.
My second prediction is that this event will cause the President to re-evaluate his own security once again - and it will come to haunt him because he will now be in panic mode. As other assassinations, such as that of Darya Dugina in Moscow show, people can be pinpointed and triangulated with relative ease. The changes he makes will follow an established pattern; people will be removed, others will step in. People, significantly, will be blamed. This will cause there to be a new tranche of disaffected former cronies who will be panic stricken that they too might fall out of a window or meet with a similar ‘accident’. And can the new bunch be trusted? Putin is desperate. He has, by becoming increasingly unhinged and merciless, reduced the pool of people who are willing to support him or capable of doing so . He has done a Stalin and liquidated hundreds of people he sees as a threat. It did not help Stalin either when his country was invaded by the Germans and an entire class of trained military officers had been killed on his orders. The mere act of beefing up his personal security will degrade it.
Hitler declared war on Russia. (I think something like five Russians died to every one combatant among the others.) Stalin did not worry about sending soldiers to certain death (estimated at over 25 million) and neither does Putin. The difference here is motivation. Regardless of the slaughter, Russian soldiers knew what they were fighting for in 1941. Today none of the seem to have a clue as to why they are in Ukraine. This makes a difference when the body bags return except that most of the bodies have not been transported home. This represents further erosion of Putin’s support base, even if that support base has hitherto been propped up by phoney elections and corruption.
Put simply, expendable people are running out. Sympathetic people are wondering how long they have before they become a ‘nuisance’. Former cronies are dying in not very mysterious circumstances. High profile supporters of the Kremlin must also be aware, as should the military be, that they are known to the Western world, they are monitored and logged and may be called to account for their crimes at the ICC.
It’s over. It was over the day Putin invaded Ukraine. It is just taking a bit longer than we would have hoped, that’s all.
My third and last prediction, for now, is about the death of Vladimir Putin. What are his options? Will he, like former Ukraine President Yanukovych, see that the game is up and flee to a safe haven? It is possible, not the least because it is certain that he has stashed a lot of cash in other countries and planned an exit strategy. But I don’t think he will get the chance. He is a pariah. Any state that harbours him, even the rotten ones, will have a burden to carry and even, a bargaining chip. He might not even get a plane for the escape because by this time chaos will reign. He cannot disappear like Radovan Karadžić did, at least for a while. Putin can hardly grow a beard and teach pottery in Venezuela can he? He would be safe nowhere. At anyone time the world will know where he is and what he had for breakfast and if he is watching Fox News or America’s Got Talent. A high price would be on his head. And they get them all in the end.
No, I discount that scenario. He has to stay put. The end will be quick. The dominoes will fall.
There are two other options for the end. One is a popular uprising. He gets taken out and shot by a mob a la Ceaușescu. There may well be a sustained and effective clamour for his removal, but it is not enough. The consolidation of Putin’s power is such that a coordinated toppling of his evil empire by average Russians would be almost unthinkable. What it would do is put the fear into his remaining cronies. There may at this point be a perceptible shift in the mood of those at the top. We must then consider the intervention of outside, international actors - either anonymous groups of hackers, etc or by a state or states that feed into this climate. Perhaps it will be a degrading of communications or banking - just enough to be noticed, but not enough to provoke world war. It seems to me that the international community is playing a long game, much to the frustration of critics, but it has to. Russia can be crushed like a fly, its infrastructure not destroyed, but brought to a grinding halt. A missile could take him out in seconds. That one is fraught with danger, so not at the moment.
The last option, the final solution, is that he will be killed by someone from within his power base. I think I have included enough data to give credence to this. His supporters enjoy their power and wealth and security because of Putin. Do you think they owe him loyalty? Loyalty is not a concept they include in their lexicon. Expediency, however is. He seems to make enemies by the day, that is, enemies who could actually kill him. They do not want to be next. Their eyes are currently focused on their own exit strategies - those suspected of war crimes especially. The rest will be frantically trying to make back door deals with the international community. Some are already doing so.
Putin will die by the gun or by bomb, the latter is most likely because as we have seen, it at least gives the assassin a chance to escape. If not by gun or bomb, then something left-field like one of his many doctors with a syringe, or poisoned food or Novichok infused underwear like his critic Alexei Navalny. He has to be lucky all the time, every minute of every day. They only need to be lucky once. The odds, I am afraid, are overwhelming in favour of his enemies.
When?
I am going to say, “soon”. The black swans are circling. The mood has changed with this latest assassination. Vladimir Putin will be dead by August 2023.
I hope you're right.