Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers a speech during a session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) in Saint Petersburg, Russia June 17, 2022. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov

i24 News – Abbas Galyamov, political consultant and former speechwriter for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, told i24NEWS that Russian elites will try to convince the leader to step down amid concerns over the worsening situation related to the Ukraine war. According to Galyamov, Russian elites “are dissatisfied with Putin but are still afraid of him.”

“The Western world didn’t offer them any exit strategies. They see that they are being sanctioned there and they are afraid of Putin’s KGB here, so they are lost. I think this year they will try to convince him to step down and find a successor, who will correct the situation,” he told i24NEWS, stressing that Putin “cannot stop the war already.”

Galyamov believes that after nearly a year of deadly fighting in Ukraine the Russian president is “at a loss.”

“Strategically he doesn’t know where to move. That’s why he’s being active but he doesn’t know how to use his activities, so he’s changing things, changing people, like promoting one general and demoting others,” Galyamov said. He added that Putin’s circle is “too afraid to tell him the truth” about the real situation at the frontlines.

“That’s why they are giving him the truth with such awful crazy interpretations that the reality becomes distorted, but no one would dare to tell outright lies to him so it’s not like they are lying to him and he doesn’t get the information, he gets it but the way he views these objective facts are distorted,” he said.

The expert believes that Putin’s rhetoric regarding the West didn’t change drastically this year as “he was moving in this direction already” because he has been losing popularity since 2018. “He needs to bring the attention back to Ukraine, to the USA, to NATO. That’s why he needs to escalate, this is the only way he can save legitimacy,” said Galyamov.

“Mentally Putin has not become a politician, he is still a KGB spy. And you know spies, they are creating special operations to deceive people because for them, unlike for politicians, if any outsider guesses what they intend, what they really think, it is a failure for them,” he added.