THERE IS NO RUSSIA:

Taken together, it suggests that President Vladimir Putin, who has balanced the interests of powerful government clans for over 20 years, is losing control. The head of GCHQ Jeremy Fleming has made a similar assessment today, saying that Russian are 'seeing just how badly Putin has misjudged the situation'. 

While Kadyrov has stopped short of directly naming Putin's close ally Shoigu, he is the one implicitly being scapegoated. Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that Kadyrov is being backed up by businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the private military company Wagner. Putin has leaned on Wagner to fight his wars, and Prigozhin's bad blood and rivalry with Shoigu over money and government contracts is well known. 'These punks should be shipped to the front barefoot with machine guns,' Prigozhin said.

Kadyrov's calls for a nuclear strike and Prigozhin's blustering might seem, at first, to serve the Kremlin's purposes by playing bad cops that make the Kremlin look conciliatory by comparison. But in reality, they are boxing Putin in, chipping away at his power. There are reasons that Kadyrov and Prigozhin are acting the way they are. None are because Putin had a secret meeting with these men telling them what to say. It is because both, in their own way, smell blood, and seem to be using the confusion and vulnerability to seek to extract money and government contracts from the Kremlin.

Kadyrov has long been a loose cannon. While professing to be Putin's loyal foot soldier and sending thousands of his own National Guard to fight Putin's wars, he has played a tough bargaining act with the Kremlin ever since Putin appointed the former rebel fighter to rule over a restive Chechnya in 2005.

In 2015, the assassination of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov just steps away from the Kremlin, attributed to at least one person with links to Kadyrov (who has always personally denied involvement in the killing), sparked growing frustration within Russia's security community. The assassination was both a profession of loyalty to the Kremlin but also a warning. It underscored that, while Kadyrov's supporters might be purportedly enthusiastic 'servants' of Putin, the Kremlin was finding it increasingly hard to control them. 

Before Russia's invasion in January, Kadyrov openly said Chechnya could not survive without Moscow's money. This summer, meanwhile, he asked the Kremlin to position air defense systems in the mountains of Chechnya. This was widely interpreted as another threat against Putin.

Does Kadyrov know how unrealistic his ambitions are? It's hard to say. But his behaviour says more about Putin's diminishing capacity to control his vassals than it does about Kadyrov himself.

Prigozhin rose to prominence under a similar trajectory to Kadyrov - with the Kremlin first outsourcing its dirty work to the Wagner group, only to see Prigozhin himself become a powerful rival to the Defense Ministry. 

According to Deborah Haynes, a security and defense editor at Sky News in the United Kingdom, Sir Jeremy Fleming, who is the director of the U.K.'s intelligence and security agency, will say in a speech tomorrow that the Ukrainian forces are "turning the tide" against Russia. "The costs to Russia...in people and equipment are staggering. We know--and Russian commanders on the ground know--that their supplies and munitions are running out.... Russia's forces are exhausted. The use of prisoners to reinforce, and now the mobilisation of tens of thousands of inexperienced conscripts, speaks of a desperate situation." 

Tonight, Forbes estimated that the missiles used in today's strikes cost between $400 and $700 million, and it is highly unlikely Putin can replace them. 

As if to illustrate Russia's weakness, its influence in Central Asia and the Caucasus region has failed, destabilizing countries formerly under its sway. This opens the way for other influences there: earlier this week, Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev, whose countries have been engaged in a deadly border dispute since Russia got involved in Ukraine and could no longer protect Armenia, held peace talks with French president Emmanuel Macron and European Council president Charles Michel without Russian representatives present.  

Tweet   @brothersjudd