It just seems hopeless. An enormous country (with a tremendous cultural history) that has never known a healthy democracy. It's just not in their DNA. I think the US will give up capitalism before Russia adopts anything resembling a healthy democracy. (Not the the US' democracy is in perfect health)

Even if Putin dies, whatever replaces him will certainly be just as bad. There will be a power vacuum, then a power struggle among oligarchs etc, and then the next Putin will emerge.

A full general strike of some kind. But Putin is popular and so is the war. Russia is a top 10 world economy, rivalling Germany in GDP PPP.

This article "The Majority Never Had It So Good", was enlightening for me about the situation in interior Russia: https://russiapost.info/regions/majority

Effectively a lot of stuff we talk about (no more travel, hard to get money outside of Russia) is meaningless to many Russians, many of which are getting good money to go fight in the war.