After Khamenei and Maduro, Putin knows he could be next
Russia's President Vladimir Putin looks on during a meeting of the Supreme State Council of the Union State of Russia and Belarus in Moscow on February 26, 2026. (Hector Retamal / AFP via Getty Images)
Nicholas Chkhaidze
Research fellow at the Topchubashov Center
On Jan. 3, 2026, Nicolas Maduro was captured by U.S. forces in a dramatic military operation. Just 56 days later, a joint U.S.-Israeli airstrike killed Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran.
For Vladimir Putin, watching from Moscow, these events were a pattern. A warning. Perhaps a prophecy. Authoritarian leaders are, above all else, students of each other's deaths. When a peer regime collapses, the lesson travels fast.
This matters to Ukraine significantly because, for Putin, the war is not just about territorial gains, but an existential fight for the survival of his regime. When dictators like Putin believe their rule is threatened, they double down and escalate. However, they also make costly strategic mistakes, creating vulnerabilities that Ukraine and its partners can exploit.
With Khamenei's death, that fear has reached crisis levels.
Putin has always been haunted by the fate of fallen dictators. He saw Muammar Gaddafi's brutal downfall and death in 2011. He saw Saddam Hussein's capture in 2003 and execution in 2006. From both of these cases, he drew a specific lesson: compromising with the West doesn't guarantee safety.
History demonstrates why, specifically, personalist dictatorships are particularly fragile.
Gaddafi's brutal 2011 crackdown didn't eliminate the opposition threat; it triggered intervention from NATO, specifically because his personalist regime had no institutional checks on violence. Saddam's downfall demonstrated how isolated leaders who rule by fear receive distorted information from "yes-men." His intelligence and secret services, which were afraid to deliver realistic news about the impending threat, provided an inaccurate analysis of Iraq's capabilities.
Venezuela's Maduro had survived years of sanctions, isolation, and Washington's sustained campaign of pressure. Yet, this year, Washington achieved what many assumed was impossible. His sudden removal, along with Khamenei's assassination, shattered the illusion of permanence in autocrats. If they fell, so can Putin.
Khamenei's assassination is fundamentally on a different level. He wasn't just another dictator, but a Supreme Leader of Iran for 36 years, the longest-serving leader in the region, and one of Putin's most important allies. He deepened cooperation with Russia and China, believing they would deter attacks. The U.S. and Israel proved him catastrophically wrong.
Autocracies like Putin's Russia depend on "output legitimacy" — specific issues, such as delivering economic growth, ensuring security, and guaranteeing "national pride and prestige." Putin's legitimacy is based on his promise of "restoring Russian greatness," retaking the so-called "historical Russian lands," and demonstrating that Russia cannot be defeated.
Ukraine managed to undermine the main pillars of Putin's personalist regime. Four years ago, on Feb. 24, 2022, he said that the "special military operation" would be fast and effective. Four years later, in 2026, Russia has over 1.2 million casualties, while gaining ground at rates of 15-70 meters per day at catastrophic cost. There's a huge gap between Putin's promises and the reality on the ground.
If Ukraine inflicts a visible strategic defeat on Russia, through territorial losses, unfavorable terms, or frozen stalemate, its elite circles will question why they accepted economic devastation and isolation from the international community, which will potentially trigger more defections.
That's why Putin will escalate rather than accept defeat.
Ukraine's not just about Donbas, Crimea, or NATO anymore; it's about his survival in the Kremlin. He'll accept enormous human or economic costs, he'll prolong the war, gamble with escalation, and raise the stakes rather than negotiate a settlement that looks like a loss.
However, escalation driven by fear is also Russia's most significant vulnerability. When leaders cannot differentiate between regime survival and national interests, they make costly errors. Anxious autocrats underestimate their opponents' resolve and overestimate their own capabilities, revealing their weakness, especially when trying to demonstrate strength.
That has already been proven by Putin's track record. His 2022 and subsequent mobilizations, meant to demonstrate resolve and unity, have sparked domestic panic and capital outflow, revealing the fragile nature of the regime. The Wagner Group's mutiny humiliated him, demonstrating exactly the sort of elite fracture that characterizes personalist regimes.
His alliances with North Korea and Iran reinforced his international isolation instead of projecting strength. Such "coalitions of the desperate" only showcase the weakness and fragility of such quasi-alliances.
His nuclear threats haven't deterred Western support, but normalized unprecedented military and financial aid to Kyiv, including F-16s, ATACMS, and long-range missiles, among others, which were once considered "red lines" by the Kremlin.
Each escalation has backfired. Russia's economy, despite numerous attempts to hold it together, faces structural decline. Moscow's dependence on Beijing has reduced Russia to a junior partner, undermining the "great power" narrative — central to Putin's output legitimacy.
Western pressure works by convincing an opponent that when costs exceed potential outcomes, continuing with the current trajectory should seem irrational. When Russia mobilizes troops that weren't properly trained, Ukraine inflicts hugely disproportionate casualties. When Putin relies on ammunition supplied by the North Koreans, it shows industrial weakness. When the Kremlin threatens nuclear escalation, it accelerates armament and reinforces unity in Europe.
And now Iran — the lynchpin of Russia's sanctions-evasion network, its most reliable arms supplier, its most significant geopolitical partner outside China — is in chaos. If the Islamic Republic collapses, Putin loses a critical node in the architecture of authoritarian interdependence that he has spent years constructing. The axis, as he built it, is actively fracturing.
Given this context, it's essential to maintain consistent support for Ukraine.
Sustained military and financial aid to Kyiv raises the costs of Russian aggression past the threshold where the regime's internal math begins to break. It creates the conditions in which Putin's fear-driven choices accelerate rather than stabilize.
Russia is escalating because it's not in a strong position. Fundamentally, when faced with anxiety and fears of losing, Putin, like many other authoritarians, will escalate, and that's exactly when he'll make crucial errors, creating vulnerabilities that can be exploited.
Vladimir Putin is watching, in the fates of his fallen peers, a possible future. The task now is to make sure that possibility becomes, for those around him, an inevitability they can no longer ignore.
Editor's note: The opinions expressed in the op-ed section are those of the authors and do not purport to reflect the views of the Kyiv Independent.
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