Sky News reports their 'analyst' Michael Clarke:

Could Putin really be ousted by his own people?

The short answer is - "no, it can't happen".

Michael Clarke explains there's "no mechanism for it" because Vladimir Putin is running a more repressive state now than in the latter days of Stalin.

"You've got to go back to the late 30s and then the late 40s to find a Stalinist Russia that was as repressive as this," he says.

"It's getting more repressive all the time."

Clarke says Putin is "going to have to be assassinated, politically or physically, by the people around him".

He adds that the Russian president is a mafia boss "who has always been a KGB man".

"If discontent builds up, which it is doing, that will only be expressed through the oligarchs and the people around him," he says.

First, there is no such thing as a 'Stalinist Russia'. 

Stalin, a Georgian, ruled something called the Soviet Union of which Russia was a part.

Unlike Putin, Stalin was responsible for the deaths of millions of Ukrainians in his attempt to apply Bolshevik ideology to enforce collective farming and industrialisation on Ukraine (and other parts of the Soviet Union) via his war on the Kulaks. 

Unlike Putin, Stalin used the Red Army to break the back of the German Wehrmacht and occupy most of Eastern Europe, subsequently repressing its peoples for decades.

Whether Putin is becoming more repressive in Russia than Zelensky has become in Ukraine is a matter for debate - but not by the MSM which toes the Ukraine=Good, Russia=Bad line to keep things nice and simple for their 'Marvel movie' readerships.

That the Russian people can't oust Putin is not much different to the people of the UK and France who can't oust Starmer or Macron despite the mess they are making of their respective economies - and that's without sanctions, apart from Trump tariffs that is.

What the UK and France need is their own Maidan but without the right-wing nationalist backing and torchlit parades that went with it.

Proposing the assassination of a world leader would provoke an outcry if the target was Trump or Netanyahu. Some Afghan nutter just got 5 years in the UK for calling for Nigel Farage - hardly a world leader - to be 'popped' but then he wasn't an academic nutter.

'Mafia boss' Putin's KGB background is no different than the 'mafia boss' CIA background of many US leaders e.g. George H W Bush, who later became President of the USA.

But of course, the CIA is 'cleaner' than the KGB because it is supposed to operate under the 'rules-based order' and generally keeps its nose out of 'allied' Europe, focusing its attention on destabilising other parts of the world, resulting in millions of civilian deaths.

And Guantanamo is not a Gulag where people are not kept chained with a bag over their heads and rendition was not the facilitated illegal kidnapping of people from all over the world - something BTW that Putin has never attempted.

Luckily for the Russian people, Putin read the riot act to the oligarchs (who did not exist under Stalin, then they were party apparatchiks) early in his presidency.

Otherwise these oligarchs would have run off with even more money, impoverished even more Russians and eventually been turned to become stooges of western democracies whose obvious goal is to foment the break up Russia by hook or by crook and get their hands on the country's vast resources. 

If anything the discontent against Putin in Russia is building up from nationalist elements because he is too cautious in his management of the war and has not 'ironed' Ukraine. Furthermore, too many Russians are still alive that remember the chaos and impoverishment of the pre-Putin 1990s, when Russia tried to follow the yellow brick road to democracy, to want to risk that mess all over again. 

Comparing Putin to Stalin is facile nonsense, belies history and is an obvious smear.

Time to read a history book.