Putin Is Losing Control From Within — Even His Own Allies Are Starting to Turn Against Him
For more than two decades, the defining feature of Vladimir Putin’s rule has been the appearance of total control: a parliament that rubber-stamps his decisions, a military command that never publicly questions his strategy, and an elite class bound to him by wealth and fear in equal measure. That appearance is now showing visible cracks, and for the first time in years, the fractures are not coming from outside Russia’s borders. They are coming from inside the system Putin built.
Over the past several weeks, a series of episodes — some public, some leaked, some almost accidental — have converged into an unmistakable pattern: members of Russia’s political, financial and military establishment are beginning to acknowledge, however cautiously, that the war in Ukraine cannot be won on the terms Putin has set, and that continuing to pretend otherwise risks dragging the country toward disaster.
A Parliament That Finally Speaks
The first and most striking fracture came from an unlikely source: the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, which for years has functioned less as a deliberative body than as a mechanism for formally approving whatever the Kremlin decided. That is precisely what made this week’s outburst so notable. A prominent opposition-aligned figure in parliament stood and told Putin directly that the economy was standing at the edge of a precipice — that he had been warned repeatedly, by the lawmaker’s own account as many as ten times, and had not listened. The first quarter of the year, the lawmaker said, had ended in outright disaster.
That admission did not stay confined to politics. A similar reckoning has begun surfacing from a far more sensitive place: inside Putin’s own military establishment. A well-known Russian military analyst recently leveled unusually blunt criticism at the Kremlin’s leadership, describing Putin as a weakened president — and tracing that weakness to the very system he built around himself. According to the analyst, years of systematic falsification had cut Putin off from reality altogether; he was no longer hearing the truth of Russia’s situation, only what he wanted to hear. It is, by most accounts, the most dangerous condition a leader can find himself in — a regime that can no longer see the real state of the country because it has become lost inside its own propaganda.
The same analyst went further, delivering an even more damaging assessment aimed squarely at the heart of Russian military prestige: the money, he said, is running out, and the enormous investment in Russia’s submarine fleet amounts to little more than an elaborate deception — the country’s nuclear submarines, he claimed, no longer have real combat capability. It is difficult to overstate the weight of that statement. For decades, the Kremlin marketed an image of invincible weaponry — nuclear submarines, hypersonic missiles, intercontinental deterrents — both to reassure the domestic public and to intimidate the West. Now, one of the people best positioned to know the truth behind that image is suggesting the display is largely hollow. If even the most expensive, most prestigious military programs amount to little more than theater, it raises uncomfortable questions about the true state of Russian military power more broadly.
Money Moving Quietly Toward the Exits
Beneath the parliamentary warning and the military admission lies a quieter but arguably more consequential shift: members of Russia’s elite are moving their money out of the country. This is not a routine investment decision. It is widely regarded as the clearest possible signal of eroding confidence — when people fear the ship may be sinking, they start moving their valuables to safety, and reports suggest some of Russia’s wealthiest figures are doing precisely that. The unease has reportedly gone far enough to stir concern at the top of the regime about the possibility of elite revolt.
That unease has names attached to it. The head of Russia’s largest bank — once among Putin’s closest economic advisers — has reportedly called for an end to the conflict, citing the damage the war is inflicting on the economy. That a figure of such stature in Russian finance would want the war to stop is, on its own, a signal that the economic wing of the regime no longer believes in it.
The discomfort has crossed Russia’s borders as well. A Central Asian head of state, in a meeting with Putin, reportedly asked openly for the conflict to be frozen, implying it no longer served any purpose — a sign that even a leader within Moscow’s traditional sphere of influence no longer trusts the Kremlin’s strength the way he once did. And the loss of confidence has shown up in perhaps the most unexpected place of all: one of the Kremlin’s most loyal state television propagandists reportedly came close to breaking down on air, acknowledging that the war had reached a difficult point and discussing the need to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people from border regions.
A Leak That Exposed the Machinery of Denial
If the political and military admissions represent one layer of the crisis, a data leak in early July exposed another. A hacking group calling itself Black Mirror, working with an anonymous channel, announced it had obtained a correspondence archive belonging to prominent media figure Ksenia Sobchak — more than 350 gigabytes spanning 2015 to 2026. Among the leaked material was correspondence allegedly involving Andriy Yermak, the former head of Ukraine’s presidential office. Sobchak has dismissed the material as fabricated, but the leak reportedly revealed something else as well: messages suggesting she had personally intervened in how her own media outlet covered Russia’s fuel crisis and drone strikes on Moscow, softening negative coverage — a glimpse, in other words, into how the Kremlin’s information apparatus manages uncomfortable economic realities.
The fallout was immediate. State television host Vladimir Solovyov used his Sunday broadcast to target Sobchak and her mother, Senator Lyudmila Narusova, without naming them directly but in terms everyone understood — accusing them of serving foreign intelligence services for money, and openly asking whether there was a conspiracy inside the inner circle. The moment carried particular weight given who Sobchak is: not an ordinary journalist, but a figure who ran against Putin for president in 2018, in a candidacy critics have long described as a controlled, Kremlin-managed form of opposition. That a state propagandist would publicly accuse a longtime insider of treason on national television is, on its own, an extraordinary rupture — and it exposed a deeper fault line. According to Rostislav Murzagulov, a former Russian political commentator who has since moved into opposition circles, the Kremlin is effectively split into two camps: a more controlled, technocratic wing associated with Sergei Kiriyenko that uses figures like Sobchak as a kind of pressure valve, and the hardline siloviki — old Putin allies such as Igor Sechin and Sergei Chemezov — who insist the war must continue at any cost. Solovyov’s attack on Sobchak, in this reading, functioned as a direct challenge to Kiriyenko’s camp, since Sobchak had long been a useful project for the technocrats and a point of vulnerability for the hardliners.
Fear Turning Into Purges
That internal tension has already produced concrete consequences. On July 10, Russia’s Justice Ministry designated antiwar politician Boris Nadezhdin a “foreign agent,” accusing him of spreading material from other designated agents and disseminating false information about the electoral system. Under Russian law, that designation effectively bars him from running in September’s Duma elections. Days later, he was detained on charges of displaying extremist symbols over a social media post linking to Alexei Navalny’s foundation, and was barred from leaving the country. Nadezhdin says the goal is to sabotage his campaign — and he was not alone; the same “foreign agent” label was applied to a campaign office linked to him and to several journalists in the same stretch of days. The pattern points to something larger than one politician being targeted: a mechanism for systematically silencing opposition voices ahead of an election, the kind of reflex that reflects not strength but genuine panic.
Loyalty Over Merit
A related but more personal illustration of that panic surfaced elsewhere in the Kremlin’s orbit. Putin reportedly awarded a relative, Anna Tsivileva, a rank equivalent to major general — despite her background being limited to work as a hospital psychiatrist before the full-scale invasion, after which she moved into business. Career officers reportedly reacted with contempt, since that rank typically takes up to thirty years of service to earn. The episode matters because it reflects a broader dynamic: a leader gripped by fear trusts fewer and fewer people, and increasingly ties his confidence to blood relations and personal loyalty rather than competence. Handing a rank earned through decades of frontline service to a relative with no connection to the war is, analysts argue, a clear marker of that insecurity — and it is generating quiet anger within the military, where a system that rewards loyalty over merit does not promote the most capable, but the closest.
The Vote the Kremlin Fears
The timing of all this internal strain is not coincidental. Russia holds regional and single-day Duma elections from September 18 to 20, and Nadezhdin’s last-minute disqualification is widely understood in that context. Even market indicators suggest the odds of any meaningful opposition success have narrowed further. According to Murzagulov, signs of declining approval for Putin are now appearing not only in independent polling but even in some pro-government sources — fueling elite anxiety ahead of the vote, as the war goes badly, the economy contracts, and parts of the elite quietly calculate their own way out.
Exiled former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky has perhaps summarized the moment most sharply: Putin’s power, in his view, always rested on two legs — repression and popularity. Popularity is now fading, leaving only one leg, the FSB. A leader propped up by an institution that never respected him, and that he never respected in return, Khodorkovsky argues, looks less like a strongman than a puppet.
The Real Source of the Panic: Empty Coffers
Underneath all of it sits the most concrete explanation of all — money. Putin’s authority has always ultimately rested on the ability to buy loyalty, fund the war, and keep the elite fed, and that capacity is visibly shrinking. According to a June 2026 report from the Kiel Institute, liquid assets in Russia’s National Wealth Fund — the country’s rainy-day sovereign fund — have collapsed from 6.5 percent of national income at the start of the war to just 1.8 percent by April 2026. Over the same period, the first-quarter budget deficit exceeded the government’s target for the entire year, and oil and gas revenue fell 45 percent year-over-year. Market analysts estimate Moscow has already sold off the majority of its gold reserves — by some estimates more than 70 percent — to help finance the war, and military spending has, for the first time in decades, exceeded total oil and gas revenue. Economic growth, once running near 4 percent, has fallen to roughly 1 percent heading into 2026, even as Russia’s dependence on China deepens, with Russian natural gas increasingly sold to Beijing at steep discounts.
Taken together, none of these individual episodes — a parliamentary warning, a military admission, a leaked archive, a purge of an antiwar candidate, an empty treasury — proves the Kremlin is on the verge of collapse. Russia’s security apparatus remains formidable, and authoritarian systems have absorbed far worse shocks without breaking. But the pattern is difficult to dismiss: for the first time in years, the cracks in Putin’s foundation are not being papered over. They are being seen, discussed, and in some cases spoken aloud by the very people the regime depends on to hold it together.
