Putin Purge Maybe

With Russia clamping down on information inside the country, it's hard to evaluate what's leaking out about internal developments. But moving from most reliable to least:

• In the wake of Putin's acknowledgement that conscipts had been sent to fight in Ukraine against his explicit orders (and apparently against Russian law), "materials have been sent to the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office to verify and legally assess the actions and punish officials responsible for failure to comply with this order," according to the Kremlin's military spokesman. The claim has been made that these conscripts have already been withdrawn, and the search for scapegoats is now under way.
• There are multiple versions of a story that the heads of the Fifth Service of the OSB, the section of the FSB ex-KGB that oversees foreign intelligence, have been placed under house arrest, ostensibly for misuse of funds.
• There may have been a larger-scale raid of multiple FSB offices by "both FSO, Federal Protective Service of the Russian Federation [and] ФСО – Putin’s own security service". The sketchy understanding I have is that the ФСО, "Federal Guard Service of the Russian Federation, is a federal government agency concerned with the tasks related to the protection of several high-ranking state officials, mandated by the relevant law, including the President of Russia, as well as certain federal properties." It seems to serve as an oversight agency over the FSB with the specific duty of protecting Putin from coup attempts from within the FSB.
• Least reliable is a rumor that "Putin is said to have sacked eight top generals in anger over the slow pace of the Ukraine invasion."

The most detailed speculation is over the house arrest of the two key intelligence officials:

The Fifth Service of the FSB, Russia’s main intelligence service, has been targeted and the leadership placed under house arrest, according to the authors’ sources.

Its head, Colonel-General Sergei Beseda, and his deputy were being held after allegations of misusing operational funds earmarked for subversive activities and for providing poor intelligence ahead of Russia’s now-stuttering invasion. The operation has hit serious obstacles, not least fierce resistance by the Ukrainian armed forces and the unity of the population, including most Russian-speakers, behind President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his government.

The Fifth Service was responsible for providing Putin with intelligence on political developments in Ukraine on the eve of the invasion. And it looks like two weeks into the war, it finally dawned on Putin that he was completely misled. The department, fearful of his responses, seems to have told Putin what he wanted to hear.

However, the problem may have gone beyond the issue of just telling Putin what he wanted to hear. According to a series of Ukraine government tweets (Budanov is Brigadier General Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine's defense intelligence chief):

Intelligence knows almost all the plans of the invader. "As soon as ideas are born in high offices, we immediately know about them," Budanov said.

31 enemy battalion-tactical group lost combat capability in two weeks. "These are terrible, unprecedented losses for the Russians," Budanov said.

The loss of personnel and equipment amid economic problems due to sanctions has led to the fact that only Vladimir Putin and the Minister of Defence of the Russian Federation Sergei Shoigu are in favor of continuing the war.

“Even the generals are overwhelmingly opposed to the war, the whole environment is trying to stop it one way or another - someone is even sabotaging the orders of the top military leadership” Budanov said.

According to a post at the Reddit Ukraine war thread,

It's been confirmed that the West has high level agents in both the Russian FSB and military version the GRU. I mean very high, like Cabinet level.

Nobody knows who it is though for obvious reasons, but certain leaks could only be known by Putin's inner circle... Such the exact locations of the Chechen Battalion in Ukraine and all the assassination attempts they were ordered to carry out to kill Zelensky, including precise details and timing of the operations, which all ended in failure and the entire Chechen Battalion being wiped out within a day.

A lot of the FSB dislike Putin so it isn't particularly surprising... There was a purge in one of the five major "FSB towers" literally just yesterday but the leaks continue.

I make no representation as to the accuracy of these reports, except to say that they do appear to be consistent with what a reaaonable person can conclude from general battlefield news.

I've observed from history generally that despots tolerate corruption among their subordinates, since it's a handy tool for eliminating them when they've worn out their usefulness. If a dragnet of the FSB finds reasons to purge key people, "misuse of funds" can be a handy charge that avoids raising too many embarrassing questions about what really happened.