President Vladimir Putin is grappling with the gravest domestic crisis of his 23-year rule: an increasingly public quarrel inside the Russian elite over who is to blame for the battlefield defeats in Ukraine.
Since he was handed the Kremlin top job by Boris Yeltsin on the last day of 1999, Putin has built around him a fiercely loyal new elite of former spies, businessmen and technocrats who agreed to resolve all disputes in private.
