Russia’s war on Ukraine is entering a new phase in which the odds of escalation are rising even without any single dramatic turning point, Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote in a Carnegie Politika commentary published on July 27.

Stanovaya’s central claim is that two incompatible trends are now pulling at the Russian system: President Vladimir Putin’s own hardline vision of the war, in which escalation keeps breeding escalation, and a growing – if still inchoate – demand inside the elite for a more realistic, achievable set of war goals. “These two trends will increasingly be pitted against one another,” she writes, absent “serious impetus to start substantive peace negotiations.”

The clearest evidence she cites is billionaire Andrey Melnichenko’s interview and essay in The Economist, in which the EuroChem and SUEK founder laid out a vision for Russia’s future that excludes war, hostility with the West or authoritarianism – the first time a prominent business figure has done so publicly since Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s 2003 arrest. Crucially, Stanovaya writes, Melnichenko did this “with Putin’s approval”: the Kremlin was briefed in advance but “seemingly underestimated” the essay’s significance, calculating that Melnichenko posed no threat because he had positioned himself as someone who could help the system achieve its goals rather than oppose it.

She draws a direct parallel to the run-up to Yevgeny Prigozhin’s 2023 mutiny: Putin, she argues, has a pattern of dismissing rising anger among figures who have loyally served the regime, “until it ends up spilling over into rebellion.”

According to Stanovaya, the elite’s central complaint after four-and-a-half years of war is no longer its duration but the widening gap between its human and economic costs and the Kremlin’s actual objectives. Discussion inside the establishment has shifted, she writes, from debating how to divide the spoils of victory – seized territory, a neutral Kyiv, caps on Ukraine’s army – to simply “minimising the colossal damage being inflicted in pursuit of even a semblance of victory.” Bureaucrats, security officials and business figures increasingly share a sense that Putin has “lost his grasp on reality,” even as he continues to run the country as though fully mobilised for war while its institutions still operate in peacetime mode.

Stanovaya stops short of predicting collapse. “For the moment, the regime is not facing imminent implosion,” she writes; “it is only approaching a political crossroads” between further radicalisation and “a process of internal restructuring and a post-Putin world.”