US resists 'regime change' talk, but Putin knows how last czar died

Joel Gehrke

October 09, 06:00 AM October 09, 06:00 AM

Russian President Vladimir Putin could lose power if Ukraine’s counteroffensive continues, exuberant European officials and dismayed Russian imperialists are beginning to suspect, though U.S. officials hesitate to indulge speculation about “regime change” in the Kremlin.

“We live in an information society and things are changing, even as we are speaking, now actually,” a senior European official told the Washington Examiner. “So we don't know what could happen, we just need to be prepared, when the right moment comes, to take the right decision.”

Other Western officials regard Putin’s fall as a more remote prospect, particularly given fair uncertainty about how much territory Ukrainian forces will liberate before the newly mobilized Russian forces can reach a critical mass of effective troops. Yet the cascade of Ukrainian forces entering once-occupied towns has provoked angry Russian military veterans into dire warnings about the ramifications of continued failure, even as President Joe Biden affirms his intention to leave space for “Putin’s off-ramp” out of the war.

“It’s not helpful to just speculate about what comes next,” the White House’s Phil Gordon, national security adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris, told a Warsaw Security Forum abuzz this week with questions about Putin’s potential collapse. “No, [it’s] not U.S. policy to create regime change in Russia, and we've been very clear about that.”

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Putin made an apparent effort to paper over the military setbacks last week by signing documents that purport to incorporate four regions of Ukraine into the Russian state — a territorial claim that exists only on paper, in many places, because Russian forces never managed to take control of all the regions. Ukrainian forces have continued to retake villages and towns across those areas, laying bare the fragility of the Russian claim and stoking the criticism of Russian veterans who have attributed their struggles to the corruption of Putin’s military team.

“We need decisive, competent people not afraid of responsibility — thinking not how to fill their pockets and finish their dacha quickly, but how to serve the motherland,” former Russian FSB officer Igor Girkin, who posed as a pro-Russian separatist commander at the outset of the war in 2014, said this week. “Will people like that be found in the president’s circle? Can he put them in places?”

Russia can “win this war” if the necessary reforms take place, Girkin maintained, but he implied that continued mismanagement could result in Putin’s regime going the way of Czar Nicholas II, the Romanov czar overthrown and killed by Bolshevik revolutionaries during the First World War.

“If this is not done, then we will certainly dance, like we all have been saying,” Girkin said. “We’ll dance to the new 1917. And we’re dancing towards it very quickly.”

Biden’s latest statements imply that he believes Putin needs to be allowed to find a way out of the war to avoid the risk of a devastating escalation of the conflict.

“We’re trying to figure out: What — what is Putin’s off-ramp?” Biden said Thursday during a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee fundraiser. “Where does he find a way out? Where does he find himself in a position that he does not only lose face but lose significant power within Russia?”

Those musings reflect a shift in tone from Biden’s stentorian remarks in March when he urged Russian citizens to “fight the corruption coming from the Kremlin” during a speech in Warsaw.

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said at the time.

Putin’s assertion of sovereignty over the partially occupied territories prompted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to try to revive that posture. He declared on Tuesday that Ukraine is “ready for a dialogue with Russia — but with another president of Russia” and urged other leaders to follow suit.

“Russia, by its example, will show all potential aggressors of the world that an aggressive terrorist war in our time is a way to weaken and inevitably destroy the one who starts such a war,” he said Friday.

Gordon, the senior U.S. official, characterized Zelensky’s call for “another president of Russia” as an emotional outburst of the sort, he implied, that Biden made in March.

“That is a natural comment for anyone to make looking at the atrocities that are taking place, caused by Putin,” he said. “And I think that's a perfectly understandable reaction to have that feeling ... and it was what President Biden expressed when he was here. But we don't have a policy of regime change. Our policy, as I said, is to impose severe costs on Russia for this aggression and to support the Ukrainian people in liberating their territory.”

That won’t stop some Western officials from dreaming of a repetition of (if not the events of 1917, then perhaps of) 1991, when an attempted military coup against Mikhail Gorbachev triggered the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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“This attempt of [a] coup d'etat in the Soviet Union happened ... and in two days, a country, with a huge economy, huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons, collapsed as a house of cards,” the senior European official said. “So we cannot actually write off any possibility, you know, because we are living in a totally different world.”