VLAD WHO?:

For weeks now, on the uncensored Telegram channels of hard-line nationalists and Russian military bloggers, there's been a litany of angry criticism of Russia's military commanders amid a stunning Ukrainian counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region and elsewhere resulting in substantial Russian losses.

Now with the Ukrainians' weekend victory in Lyman, a Donetsk region city and strategic rail hub southeast of Kharkiv, that criticism is bursting into wider public view, hitting the front pages of some of Russia's biggest newspapers.

That's a serious problem for Russia's military brass -- and potentially for the Kremlin.

"I wouldn't predict a palace coup imminently. If there were one, we'd almost be the last ones to know about it, these things happen pretty swiftly when they do," said James Nixey, who heads the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Chatham House think tank in London. "But obviously, there is increasing discontent in the upper Russian echelons about the course of the war, and that is being manifested in various ways, people can't hold it in."

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