File photo of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. AP
New Delhi: Russian President Vladimir Putin’s former speechwriter has predicted that a military coup was possible in the country next year due to deteriorating economy and the growing unpopularity of the war in Ukraine.
In an interview to CNN, Abbas Gallyamov, Putin’s former speechwriter who is now a political commentator, said that the Russian president could face a rising tide of domestic resistance as the war goes on.
“The Russian economy is deteriorating. The war is lost. There are more and more dead bodies returning to Russia, so Russians will be coming across more difficulties and they’ll be trying to find explanation why this is happening, looking around to the political process and they’ll be answering themselves: Well, this is because our country is governed by an old tyrant, an old dictator,” CNN quoted Gallyamov as saying.
And as people confront this reality, “a military coup will become possible”, Gallyamov argues.
“So in one year when the political situation changes and there’s a really hated unpopular president as the head of the country and the war is really unpopular, and they need to shed blood for this, at this moment, a coup becomes a real possibility,” he said.
The nation is set to hold presidential elections in 2024, but according to Gallyamov, it’s possible that Putin would call off the vote in light of the conflict.
Putin’s approval rating
However, what Putin’s aide seems to suggest is contrary to what the polls show. If anything, support and trust in Putin has increased since the war in Ukraine started at the end of February.
According to the Levada Centre, a Russian independent, non-governmental polling and sociological research organisation, Putin’s personal popularity ranking stood at 83 per cent in March, with 15 per cent holding an unfavourable opinion of the president and 2 per cent unsure, and stayed at that level until August, when things started to go wrong with the campaign in Ukraine.
His popularity fell to 77 per cent (21%, 2%) in September, after Ukraine’s spectacular Kharkiv counter-offensive began, but recovered to 79 per cent in October and November to end the year in December at 81 per cent (17%, 2%).
Overall, Putin has been enjoying the same “patriotic bump” that lifted his ratings following the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
During the previous two years of 2020 and 2021 his ratings wavered between 61 per cent and 69 per cent but only crossed into the 70 per cent plus range as the rhetoric with the West went up a notch at the start of the crisis at the beginning of 2022.
With inputs from agencies
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