Am I the other one?

I'll believe it when I see it.

He's a hard cockroach to get rid of.

His replacement will almost certainly be bad but they will have the opportunity to hang the whole Ukraine debacle on Putin and end the war. No certainty of this of course, but it's possible.

Even if Putin's successor adopts real democracy, it will take generations to change the national psyche that thinks they need a strong leader. As much as the west hates Putin, he does have real support among the people. At least as long as he remains strong.

Probably, but there's likely to be a lot of infighting about which one of them would take over.

After Stalin it took more than 50 years for anyone to achieve the kind of power that he had. Once Valodja is gone (can't be soon enough), the situation will be similar. The satraps will fight among themselves and maybe, just maybe there will be some meaningful opposition again.

"Fallen at his command post," eh? Sounds like what they'd report if Trump choked to death on a hamberder while on the toilet.

The bigger issue is that Trump and Putin are just the most visible part of the problem.

If they both died tomorrow (oh god please), another would simply take their place. It would require a complete deprogramming of their supporters on the scale of Germany in 1945. The problem is that the entire government needs to fall for that to ever even be attempted. It would literally require a revolution or large scale invasion for that to happen at this point, and even then, as we've seen with Russia and Northern Africa quite a few times, revolutions have a tendency to just pave the way for the next lunatic to take power.

In USA, invasion isn't really possible, so it would have to be an incredibly violent and costly (in human lives) revolution, with a slim chance to actually change anything.

An invasion of Russia is probably possible, but it would require some insane inside help to make sure they don't just nuke everything when they realise they've lost anyway. A revolution probably wouldn't do much, because of the brainwashing problem.

The entire "ecosystem" of Russian leadership is built around a strongman. If Putin dies, the next one win based on the criteria that made Putin the leader. So there are two options: a big fucking fight, or someone roughly as bad.

And if it's option 2, their level of shittyness depends mostly on how effective Putin was in defenestrating his rivals.

Fear of the "next guy" is the only reason la'orang is still alive. All of this is the fault of people gearing "what's next". The number of evil people on earth is finite. Even if the next one is worse, there's only one way forward. So just take the win. The number of evil is about to drop by one

Putin being at the end of the table is probably because he's terrified of being assassinated, but the photos of him at the last Victory Day Parade look terrible. Out of makeup, he looks look a walking corpse.