I'm pretty sure military and political strategists have been working on a solution for several years, starting way before February 24.

CIA, Mossad and MI6 probably have several kill teams on standby in st Petersburg and Moscow, ready to take out various people who might oppose a regime change. They are cooperating, although reluctantly.

The problem is that you don't want to create a power vacuum, that attracts the wrong kind of people and/or might lead to a civil war. You don't want that.

What you want is a transition of power in an orderly way.

My theory is that they are just going to wait him out. The man is well past his best before date, and no one lives forever. In the mean while, damage control.

Multiple countries or regions in a loose federation is indeed a good idea.

The problem is that you would have to transfer power to legally established governments in those countries and in Russia, basically everyone who holds a position in any government function is a corrupt thug (not only in Russia, by the way).

You would have to restart things from scratch, like they did in Germany in 1945. Now that was a situation where several other big and mighty countries pushed for it, and in general the German population saw a need for things to change so they had a positive attitude.

In Russia, the effort to change things would be much greater. First, Russians are natural born pessimists. "And then it got worse" could as well be the first line of their national anthem.

Second, they have had a considerable brain drain in the past decades. It will be difficult to find qualified and honest people to run local governments. You have your elected representatives of course, but for each of those you need a hundred civil servants doing the actual work. Contrary to popular belief, that actually takes some brain power.

That is indeed one part of the problem. Another part would be huge streams of refugees, creating problems for everybody. A third consideration would be local warlords financing terrorist actions in other parts of the world.

> what sources do you have for that argument though?

Just my own common sense and about sixty years of experience with how humans do things.

I agree. But there are some considerations. You cannot kill him outright, that would lead to Russia falling apart in dozens of regions controlled by the local warlord and having armed conflicts with each other.

The thing to do would be transition power to a more sane consortium than what they have had the last 30 years. But that is not an easy thing to do. Everyone is corrupt, and everyone expects elections to be corrupt as well.

I see no deadly snakes, nor poisonous spiders. Also, no great whites or drop bears. Even the jackdaws are absent.

Are you sure this is Australia?

The pessimist: "Wow! Things are so bad, they can't get much worse".

The optimist: "Nah, don't you worry. They can get much worse!"