A note before reading:
This is a thought experiment, and it is labeled as one for a reason. It takes a formula that many people have quietly run in their heads, states it plainly, and tests it link by link to see whether it holds. It does not. Nothing here advocates violence against anyone. The piece exists to follow a dangerous idea to its end and show where it breaks, because ideas left unexamined do more damage than ideas taken apart in daylight. Read it to the last line before deciding what it says.
I am a humanist, a Buddhist of sorts, and I wish harm on no human being. Therein lies much of our problem today against those who do not share that orientation.
The answer is not to become them. Still, one must think it through. What follows does.
Here is the formula, stated plainly.
Remove Putin. Remove whoever reaches for the chair next, and the one after, until a Russian leader emerges who wants back into the world. Moscow, stung, answers in kind, and the American president falls to hands no one sees. Neither country's opposition carries the stain. Both are freed. Peace follows.
It has a terrible symmetry. Two countries locked in death spirals by two men. Two oppositions that cannot act without inheriting the illegitimacy of the act. One exchange that frees them both.
Plenty of people have run some version of it in their heads. Few have run it to the end. So test it. Link by link.
Link one: remove Putin
This is the strongest link, and it deserves to be taken seriously. The war is unusually personal. Putin wrote the essays denying Ukrainian nationhood. He made the decision in a small room with a smaller circle. Russian elections cannot remove him; this month's managed vote returned his party as designed. The people bleeding for the war cannot vote their way out, speak their way out, or walk out.
There is evidence that leadership removal matters. Economists Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken studied a century of assassination attempts on national leaders and found that successful killings of autocrats were followed by moves toward democracy more often than failed attempts were. Stalin's death in 1953 was followed within months by an armistice in Korea and the end of the Doctors' Plot.
So link one holds, as a proposition: Russia without Putin might be a different Russia. Keep that in mind. It matters at the end.
Link two: remove the next, and the next
Here the formula starts to strain. The constitution hands power to the prime minister. Behind him stand the security services, people who survived twenty-five years by being the most careful and most ruthless in the room.
Each removal teaches the survivors one lesson: the West kills Russian leaders. The ones who rise next are the ones built for a siege. The filter does not select for the rational. It selects for the paranoid.
And someone has to decide who counts as rational. Whoever makes that call is choosing Russia's leader. Russians have seen this before, in other countries, and so have we. Iran, 1953. The installed leader held power for a quarter century. Then came the revolution, and the grievance still shapes Iranian politics seventy years later. A leader chosen by elimination abroad is a leader illegitimate at home.
Link three: Moscow answers in kind
This is where the formula contradicts itself.
It requires the new Russian leadership to be two things at once: rational enough to want back into the international community, and willing to kill an American president. Those are not compatible. A rational leader seeking reentry does not commit the one act guaranteed to make reentry impossible. Through forty years of Cold War, with every motive and every capability, neither Washington nor Moscow killed the other's head of state. Not from squeamishness. From calculation. Both understood what came after.
If the retaliation comes instead from the security hardliners in the interval, before the rational leader arrives, then the formula has handed the decisive act to exactly the people it was designed to filter out.
Link four: no one carries the stain
This is the load-bearing beam. The whole formula exists to solve one problem: the domestic opposition cannot act without inheriting the act.
But the stain does not disappear when the hand is foreign. It moves.
If Russia is identified, Russia owns it, and the United States is at war footing with a nuclear power. If Russia is not identified, the vacuum fills with certainty in every direction. John F. Kennedy had a known shooter, and sixty years later most Americans still suspect a conspiracy. A death with no author would be assigned one within the hour, along tribal lines. Tens of millions would name the American left no matter what the evidence said.
The formula does not remove the stain. It distributes it to everyone.
Link five: both countries are freed
The American half of the premise holds that the movement lives only in the man. Remove him and it dissolves.
History says otherwise. Perón was exiled in 1955 and died in 1974; Peronism still structures Argentine politics. Chávez died of cancer in 2013; Chavismo continued through Maduro. Personalist movements survive their founders routinely. They survive best when the founder is taken from them. A sudden vacancy would not end the movement. It would hand it a martyr and hand the successor a mandate.
And it would hand the state a pretext. The Reichstag burned on February 27, 1933. The emergency decree came the next day. In Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024, a gunman produced not collapse but a raised fist and a wave of sympathy. A government already testing emergency powers would not treat a sudden vacancy as an ending. It would treat it as an opening.
Link six: peace follows
The final link asks the United States to make peace with the state that killed its president. No American public would accept it. No American government could survive proposing it. The formula ends not in peace but in the war it was built to prevent, this time between the two largest nuclear arsenals on earth.
The verdict
On the American side, the formula fails at every link after the first. It does not break the spiral. It feeds it, then hands the spiral a martyr, a pretext, and a foreign enemy.
On the Russian side, the question stays open.
Link one held. Russia without Putin might be a different Russia. What the formula got wrong was not the destination but the hands. Every case where a leader's death changed a country's course for the better shares one feature: the change came from inside. Stalin's successors ended the terror because they feared it themselves, not because anyone abroad made them.
Whether that happens in Russia depends on whether the people around Putin decide the war costs them more than it gives them. That calculation is happening now, in rooms no one outside can see. The outside world can raise the price. It cannot pick the outcome.
Hundreds of thousands dead. One man ordering it. The arithmetic is real.
The formula is not.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.
He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.
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