Just last week, Putin said in Red Square in front of a large crowd, “”Victory will be ours!” It’s worth seeing him say it to get a sense of his resolution on this point. Just skip to the end of this clip.

"We have become stronger because we are together! Truth is behind us, and in truth there is strength, which means victory. Victory will be ours!” Vladimir Putin said during his address to the Russians at a rally-concert on Red Square pic.twitter.com/eObaxZB2wp

— cooper (@coope125) September 30, 2022

How does a guy who is losing territory by the day have that much confidence? Like most authoritarian leaders, Putin lives in a bubble surrounded by people who are mostly afraid to burst that bubble.

“He’s in a blind zone. It seems he’s not really seeing what’s happening,” the editor of Riddle Russia, Anton Barbashin, argues of Russia’s president…

“You can’t question his ideas,” explains Tatyana Stanovaya, the head of R.Politik analysis firm.

“Everyone who works with Mr Putin knows his picture of the world and of Ukraine, they know his expectations. They can’t deliver him information that contradicts his vision. That’s just how it works.”

And so you have a divergence between what is actually happening and what is being acknowledged at the top. Putin is promising victory but here’s what is actually happening is something else.

Racing down a road with his men in pursuit of retreating Russian soldiers, a battalion commander came across an abandoned Russian armored vehicle, its engine still running. Inside there was a sniper rifle, rocket propelled grenades, helmets and belongings. The men were gone.

“They dropped everything: personal care, helmets,” said the commander, who uses the code name Swat. “I think it was a special unit, but they were panicking. It was raining very hard, the road was bad and they drop everything and move.”

After months of static fighting and holding the line under withering Russian artillery barrages, Ukrainian soldiers are exulting over their smashing of Russian lines in the northeast three weeks ago, and their recapturing of swaths of territory seized by Russian troops earlier this year. They have almost retaken the whole of Kharkiv Province, as well as territory in each of the four regions that President Vladimir V. Putin claims to have annexed for Russia…

“We have the strength to do this,” Swat said. “Because right now they are in panic, they really are in panic.”

That’s not to say this is all one sided or that Ukraine isn’t taking heavy losses in the process of retaking territory. If you read the whole story, these soldiers are worried about what the partial mobilization will mean for the near future. Still there’s no denying Russia is on the back foot at the moment. Is that reality getting through to Putin?

According to a report in the Washington Post today, at least one member of Putin’s inner circle has “voiced disagreement” with him directly.

A member of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle has voiced disagreement directly to the Russian president in recent weeks over his handling of the war in Ukraine, according to information obtained by U.S. intelligence.

The criticism marks the clearest indication yet of turmoil within Russia’s leadership over the stewardship of a war that has gone disastrously wrong for Moscow, forcing Putin last month to order the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of troops in a desperate bid to reverse recent battlefield losses.

The information was deemed significant enough that it was included in President Biden’s daily intelligence briefing and shared with other U.S. officials, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.

Whoever that person is must be very confident about his relationship with Putin because the president’s critics have a nasty habit of falling out of high windows. European intelligence officials told the Post they hadn’t heard about this particular dissention near the top but they agreed the pressure was creating fractures.

One senior European security official described growing “criticism of Putin — behind his back,” including from within the Kremlin ranks. “They think he’s stubborn,” the official said, and “obsessed with Ukraine” — an “obsession they do not necessarily share.”

A second security official in Europe said: “There is scapegoating. Finger-pointing. All of this is happening.”

None of this means that Putin is in any danger of being removed from power any time soon or that he’s likely to change his mind about the war. But it is significant that the situation has become dire enough that Putin is starting to hear about it even from the people closest to him. The fear of shame and failure is starting to rival the fear of speaking up to the big boss.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, author of “The Russia Conundrum” says there is a wave of sobering realization ripping through Putin’s inner circle, which he believes is glued together by fear and the fact that these cronies are all “tarred with corruption.”…

“If the armed forces of Ukraine continue to win, the threat to the lives of Putin’s entourage will become so great that they may actually try to reduce this threat, by forcing Putin to leave,” Khodorkovsky tells Fox News. “This is an option. Putin understands this and in fact, he is very afraid of this.”…

“What Putin is doing now, threatening the use of nuclear weapons, losing the war, this insane mobilization—this tells these people that by remaining in power Putin poses a threat not only to them and their lives, which many of them have already accepted, but it is a threat to their children and their families.”

At some point, things get dire enough that people have to choose between protecting themselves and their families or maintaining Putin’s ego. We’re not there yet but we may be seeing the first cracks appear.