Outsiders often see the curious spectacle of multiple power groups within the Russian system and think it means chaos. In fact, Putin has used the principle of opposing interests for over two decades. Here's how it works: in principle, the military could prove to be a center of opposition to his FSB-based administration. So as to mitigate this, Putin has his own praetorian guard (the National Guard) of 400,000 armed personnel. Tricky to mount a coup when your target has nearly half a million people to defend him. But this isn't enough, so the Wagner Group is permitted to operate so as to provide yet another counterpoint to the formal military structure. Putin's regime is based on the concept of ensuring that there's always mutual hostility and suspicion among the various power elements of the State, so that infighting predominates and no one has the capacity to engineer his removal.

Of course, this results in very low effectiveness on the battlefield but in the end that is far less important to Putin than his own survival.

As for the question of whether or not Russia will collapse into civil war, we must earnestly hope this will happen eventually as Putin's underlings fight it out for the spoils. An ideal outcome will be the fragmentation of Russia into a number of sub-States, each ruled by a thuggish overlord. This will prevent Russia from being a threat to western Europe for at least a generation. As Russia collapses into chaos, everyone who can leave will do so. This will mean that there are few - if any - left to service the complex machinery upon which so much Russian production depends. And so its oil and gas, and its nuclear weapons, will rust and become useless, further ensuring that the remnants of Russia will not trouble anyone else for decades to come.

But first, we have to get there...