As Russia continues to get routed in eastern Ukraine – losing territory, machinery and personnel to an emboldened Ukrainian counteroffensive – infighting has intensified in the Kremlin. Looking for someone to blame, the various factions are increasingly attacking Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and his Ministry, and seeking an escalation of hostilities in Ukraine.

When Russia lost the town of Lyman less than 24 hours after illegally annexing four regions that included it, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov called for a tactical nuclear strike on Ukraine. He also lashed out against the General Staff, and threatened to send Central Military District Commander Alexander Lapin to the front to ‘cleanse his shame in blood’. While the Kremlin was forced to downplay Kadyrov’s ’emotional’ remarks, yesterday’s missile strikes against Kyiv seem in part like a desperate measure by Putin to assuage hawks.

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.

For eight years since Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Putin relied on all sorts of freelancers, businessmen and shady characters to carry out its shadow invasion of Donbas. Most notable of these was Igor Girkin. In April 2014, the former FSB officer led dozens of men across the Russian border into Ukraine. As a result, he eventually became the leading military commander of the Russian-backed separatists. According to various sources, this was against the advice of his handlers. After months of begging the Kremlin for weapons and troops, he was quietly removed. In 2014, however, Putin was far too timid to either carry out the full-scale invasion that Girkin and others in the FSB were calling for, nor shut down their separatist project fully. After all, it is the FSB, and not so much the Defense Ministry, which he relies upon to maintain his grip on power.

Putin, who has a track record of delegating responsibility to his vassals and making decisions at the very last minute to leave himself as many options as possible, is ending up with fewer and fewer good choices. With defeat looming in Ukraine, cutting his losses may be his best chance for survival. But even as government elites remain too scared to stand up to him – this is why, for now, the attacks are directed against the Defense Ministry, not the Kremlin itself – Putin is too scared to stand up to his most fervent hawks, the ones calling for escalation in Ukraine. Why? Because he knows that, without the Defense Ministry standing between them, he is the one they will come at next.

In the process, Putin is undermining his own capability to balance the various factions that rule over Russia. But what the ferocious infighting is making clear is precisely the dangerous illusion of his control – the mirage with which he has inveigled the West, his own people, and, worst of all for him – himself.