Fiona Hill

He's getting this backlash from the war in Ukraine.

He's got an insurgency.

There's a man marching on Moscow.

Could this be it?

Could this be a coup?

And there wasn't a lot of support for Putin.

But of course, that fizzled out.

And it's many months before Yevgeny Prigozhin meets his demise by literally falling from the greatest window in the sky, as people have a tendency to do in Russia, meeting mysterious, unfortunate deaths.

And that's the end of all of that.

So what Putin is waiting for right now is to see if, in many respects, those escapades in both Iran

and Venezuela, which look extraordinarily harmful from all the vested interests that they have in particular in Venezuela in terms of oil, sending in security forces to prop up Maduro.

Iran's support for a whole matter and manner of different issues for Russia, from actually helping them counteract Sunni Muslim insurgents in the country, because of course, Iran is Shia, to helping produce that first batch of

of drones that Russia has used against Ukraine to pretty good effect as well, the Shaheed drones, to being that other great kind of power in the region.

Their hope, I think, now is that everything else goes kind of haywire, that it doesn't follow those trajectories that everyone might anticipate Iran

The theocracy doesn't fall because that would bring all kinds of uncertainty and actually not a good look for Putin.

And as is the case, we're already seeing in the case of Venezuela, Maduro is just being replaced by his deputy.

So for Putin, that's actually not that bad.

So he will wait to see how this plays out.

It's like a judo tournament for him.

You wait till everybody else is off balance.