Could a Kremlin assassin get to Putin?

Could an assassin kill Putin? Just as the second world war would not have happened without the demonic will and agency of Adolf Hitler, so the invasion of Ukraine – and its horrific bloodshed and unspeakable human misery – is Putin’s war. Can he be stopped? The bad news is that the chances do not look good at the moment.

Putin is protected 24/7 by one of the world’s strongest security details, who have sealed him in a closed bubble. All access to him is strictly – almost manically – controlled, in much the same way as it was for Stalin and Hitler. The chances of a lone outside assassin like Fanny Kaplin – a Jewish Ukrainian woman, who, in 1918, fired three bullets into the Bolshevik leader Lenin, touching off a series of strokes that crippled and eventually killed the Soviet dictator – getting to the dictator are zero. If Putin is to be stopped, ousted, and arrested or assassinated, the authors of such an attempt will have to come from within the clique who surround him.