It’s either the best or worst ending to the war in Ukraine, but first one has to buy what Igor Strelkov is selling in this interview. The Russian war analyst and reputed former loyalist to Vladimir Putin says that the fight to overthrow the Russian dictator has already started. Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin has essentially begun publicly arguing for power, Strelkov says, while Sergei Shoigu and his clique work more quietly to compete.

The point, Strelkov insists, is that the tsar has lost control of the situation. “The fight for the political Olympus has begun between the groupings that surround Putin,” he declares:

It’s not just Prigozhin and Shoigu, says the former FSB colonel and the architect of the 2014 quasi-occupation of the Donbas:

The fight at the top of the Kremlin focuses on insurgent Putin crony Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner private army, and loyalist forces in the defence ministry around weakening defence minister Sergei Shoigu, according to Strelkov.

Others believe security apparatchiks around ex-FSB head Nikolai Patrushev – secretary of the powerful security council – are more likely to pull the trigger on Putin in a bid to save the elite ruling circle if the war continues to go wrong.

Some claim the security bloc is lining up his son Agriculture Minister Dmitry Patrushev as the frontman for a coup replacing Putin if he is forced out by war setbacks or ill health. …

‘The grouping of Yevgeny Prigozhin [head of Wagner private army] stands against grouping which includes Sergei Shoigu [Russian defence minister],’ said Strelkov, real name Igor Girkin, former defence minister of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic.

The debacle in Ukraine started off as a military crisis, says Strelkov/Girkin, but it is has expanded to an existential crisis for the regime. What would come next if Strelkov’s analysis is correct? At least one new mass mobilization, perhaps more, and a “cull of top commanders.”

That might take place with or without Putin having a firm grip on power in the Kremlin, however. As Strelkov points out, Russia needs a much larger army than anticipated to conquer Ukraine. Putin, Prigozhin, and Shoigu all got that calculation wildly wrong from the start, assuming that Ukrainians would either meekly surrender or welcome their Muscovite overlords. Even a half-million more infantry — the figure Strelkov suggests — might not make much difference give the lack of training and supply the recently mobilized infantry received. The likely outcome of 300,000 more Russians added to the 200,000 mobilized in the previous round would be a lot more cannon fodder lying in Ukrainian mass graves. Quantity is a quality all its own, but it’s not that transformative under incompetent leadership and logistics.

Besides, the Prigozhin/Shoigu feud is not new. When it became clear that Russian commanders had proven incompetent and military preparation a myth in the first weeks of the war, Shoigu reportedly was on his way out. Clearly, his base of power in the Kremlin is stronger than first thought, but his performance is every bit as bad as it has been all along. The recent destruction of an entire battalion that bivouaced openly within easy range of Ukrainian HIMARS artillery — and on top of an ammo depot, no less — has reignited fierce criticism of the military among hardliners and ultranationalists, ISW reports:

The Russian milblogger information space continues to seize on official responses to the Ukrainian HIMARS strike on a Russian base in Makiivka to criticize endemic issues in the Russian military apparatus. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) released an official response to the strike on January 4 and attributed it to the “presence and mass use by personnel, contrary to prohibitions, of mobile telephones within range of enemy weapons systems.”[1] The Russian MoD also claimed that the death toll of the strike is now 89, including a deputy regimental commander, Lieutenant Colonel Bachurin.[2] The clear attempt by the Russian MoD to blame the strike on individual mobilized servicemen, as ISW assessed the Russian MoD would likely do on January 2, drew immediate ire from Russian milbloggers.[3] One milblogger emphasized that it is “extremely wrong to make mobile phones guilty for strikes” and concluded that “it is not cell phones and their owners that are to blame, but the negligence of the commanders.”[4] Several milbloggers noted that the use of cell phones on the frontline in the 21st century is inevitable and that efforts to crack down on their use are futile.[5] The milblogger critique of the Russian MoD largely converged on the incompetence of Russian military command, with many asserting that the Russian military leadership has no understanding of the basic realities faced by Russian soldiers on the frontline and is seeking to shift the blame for its own command failures on the “faceless masses” of Russian mobilized recruits.[6]

The Russian milblogger response to the Russian MoD deflection of blame onto individual servicemen accurately identifies the endemic unwillingness or inability of the Russian military apparatus to address systemic failures. Cell phone use may have aided the Ukrainian strike to some degree, but the Russian MoD’s fixation on this as the cause of the strike is largely immaterial. An appropriately organized and properly trained and led modern army should not permit the convergence of the factors that contributed to the Makiivka strike in the first place. The Russian command was ultimately responsible for the decision to pack hundreds of mobilized men into non-tactical positions within artillery range of the frontline and near an ammunition depot.[7] The Russian MoD is likely using the strike to further deflect blame for its own institutional failures in the conduct of the war onto mobilized forces, whose own conduct is additionally emblematic of the Russian force generation failures.[8]

The attempt to blame cell-phone usage highlights another failure of Shoigu’s that had been apparent since the failed attempt to sack Kyiv. Russia’s secure communications are a disaster; apparently they don’t work much at all. Soldiers had to communicate with cell phones using the Ukrainians’ networks just to stay in touch with their commanders, which Ukrainians exploited almost since the day of the invasion. As a result, we have seen a flood of recordings from unsecured communications between soldiers, as well as some of their calls home to their families. It may be impossible to separate infantry troops from cell phones in modern warfare now, but in truth Shoigu’s incompetence has made those cell phones a necessity.

The question here is whether the feuds aim at replacing Putin, as Strelkov/Girkin claims, or are just the normal court politics of a dictatorship. Thus far, nothing suggests that it’s more than the latter, which have been developing for months if not years before now. At some point, those might get profound enough to aim high enough to target the dictator, but the situation at the moment still looks like a power play to get Putin’s favor for overall control of the war effort, not to rule Russia in his place.

And that may be a good thing, in the long run. Putin’s exit would look like a good development, but none of the figures mentioned by Strelkov/Girkin would improve matters. Each of them would likely be more bloodthirsty than Putin, or at least as bloodthirsty, and would be more desperate for wins that would shore up political standing in a power struggle. The best that we could hope for in such a meltdown is that all of these players immolate their factions and allow for a popular revolt to seize control and restore some sanity — but it’s a lot easier to imagine a civil war between Shoigu’s military and Prigozhin’s mercenaries first.