Moscow is in crisis.
Manoeuvrings at the highest levels in Russia are always difficult to read clearly, but one thing is certain about what is happening in Moscow: the Kremlin is panicking.
The real indications that there is a crisis come from within Russia itself.
Soldiers in army trucks are being moved around the streets of Moscow, reinforcing key facilities such as television stations and energy infrastructure.
Vladimir Putin has gone into hiding.
Russian state TV has interrupted programming several times to urge people not to listen to the “disinformation” being spread.
What disinformation?
This is the Kremlin’s equivalent to the pilot, out of the blue, telling passengers not to panic.
Then there’s the Russian Defence Ministry which has said that the only winner out of the current “confusion” will be Ukraine.
What confusion?
There is only one clear winner out of this – Ukraine.
The nightmare scenario for Putin
Having been fighting a brutal war in the muddy trenches of Europe, suddenly the Wagner fighters are leaving and if the crisis in Russia escalates, Putin may need to call soldiers from the Ukrainian frontline to help to reinforce his position.
This crisis has been driven by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the wild man of Russian politics.
Prigozhin is head of the Wagner group, the group of ruthless mercenaries who Russia has been using to try to win its war with Ukraine.
Prigozhin has been criticising Russia’s military commanders for months, knowing he had the safety to do so given the country’s president needed him.
Without Wagner fighters, Russia would not have been able to win the Battle for Bakhmut.
But this time it’s different.
He has now said that his 25,000 fighters, who are leaving Ukraine, will march on Moscow.
One of Russia’s top generals went so far as to say this is Prigozhin launching a “coup”, a claim the Wagner chief denies.
The words that may have crossed a line for Putin
Prigozhin is famous for his online screeds, but it was his latest utterance that appears to have triggered this crisis.
“Why was the war needed? The war was needed so that a handful of scumbags could have a blast and get PR attention showing how strong the army is, so that [Russian Defence Minister Sergei] Shoigu could become a Marshal,” he said.
“The war was needed not in order to return the Russian citizens to our bosom. And not in order to “demilitarise and denazify Ukraine”.
“It was needed for one star with additional embroidery so that one mentally sick man could look good on a coffin pillow.”
These words, among others, have ignited a crisis.
The hammer in Prigozhin’s public comments was that Putin was wrongly advised on the need for the war in the first place.
He has said that NATO was never a real threat to Russia, and that Putin should not have been advised such.
This is classic Prigozhin: He manages to survive because his troops are needed and because he is careful not to attack Putin himself.
But on this occasion he clearly is attacking Putin, a man who launched a war that has gone disastrously wrong for Russia on a false pretext.
Oligarchs ‘army up’ as discontent mounts
This is Putin’s “no weapons of mass destruction” moment.
Beneath this bubbling instability is another context – the dramatic growth of private armies since the war began.
While everyone focuses on the Wagner group – believed to have 25,000 men – many of the oligarchs and large corporations have private armies.
They call them security personnel, but they’re armies.
Gazprom, for example, has a private army of an estimated 50,000 people.
Most of the oligarchs have “armied-up” over the last year.
The reason they have been building their own armies is in the event that the war would go badly for Putin and a civil war would break out in Russia.
Those oligarchs would, right now, be thinking they may have made a good investment.