The suggestion of splitting a country between two aggressors seems like something designed to rile the Polish electorate, as they remember all too well when Hitler and Stalin did that to Poland. I kinda doubt the veracity of that claim. But I don’t rule it out.
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BRICS is not a group. It is a convenient acronym (coined by economist Jim O’Neill, I believe) to refer to a set of countries whose economies shared a certain profile, at the time he came up with it. There is no formal BRICS group.
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For who, though?
I suspect the warlord faction would have been preoccupied with fighting each other and pillaging the country. Not organised enough to mount an external war.
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Unlike Putin, who fancies himself a statesman, Prigozhin and Kadyrov don’t bother hiding the fact that they’re fascist thugs. They’ll continue the war because violence is the only thing they know. Prigozhin touts his neo-Nazi mercenaries as the key to winning in Ukraine; Kadyrov boasts that his terror troops will do the job. This is the warlord faction’s only claim to what passes for political legitimacy in Russia – they offer no economic plan, no promise of “order and stability”, certainly no reform agenda.
And yes, they’ll fight with each-other as fascists do, but there will be a lot more collateral damage on ordinary Russians because it will be an internal gang war running alongside the occupation of Ukrainian territory. It won’t be corrupt officials and oligarchs falling out of windows, but drive-by shootings and bombs set off in buildings. Political opponents will be murdered rather than send to the gulag.
This isn’t an endorsement of the Putin regime by any means, just pointing out that there are even worse alternatives to the current rotten situation. Whichever faction wins out – Putin, warlord, military, siloviki – it’s only a matter of degree of how bad it will be for the Russian people.
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I have seen Russian exiles state that the only way the war will end is if Putin dies, but they also are aware that it will be the death of Stalin all over again, years of infighting until a Khrushchev arises to Putin’s Stalin.
I am wary, because of my experiences with “burn it all down” types here in the West, in the USA, but also in Germany, and the idiots who brought about Brexit.
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And there’s no guarantee that a relative reformer like Khrushchev was will come out on top of a post-Putin power struggle.
Russia’s going to burn down for sure, but no-one in the West should be cheering on the process or putting down bets on a good outcome arising from the ashes.
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Yes. Where we are, you are correct that neither option is better. But those thugs may be more pragmatic about ‘loss of face’ than Putin could ever be.
Had they taken control before the war, there would not have been a war. (Sorry, I inferred your ‘would’ there as past tense, back to then.) But we are where we are and those fuckers are in their element. But, as I say, they may be more pragmatic if painted into a very uncomfortable corner somehow - i.e. by Ukraine’s continued ability to wage effective defence.
Re “Ukraine is burning through ammunition faster than the US and NATO can produce…” we really do need the West to face up to the fact that it is in our best interests to put ourselves on a war production footing. It’s the only way we do not end up either going to war directly, or end up betraying Ukraine (which just puts war with Russia off a bit longer).
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The most pragmatic faction re: Ukraine might end up being the military. They know this war is an unsustainable fiasco, Russia’s colonels and low-level generals don’t care about the Duginist ideological garbage or about maintaining the sham republics in Donbass, and aren’t thrilled about managing a disgruntled conscript army. They’ll be happy to place the blame for the invasion’s failure on Putin and his cronies if they pull out of the war after staging a coup.
Of course, the best that can be hoped for after that is something resembling Egypt’s governmental structure, but that’s a separate matter from ending the war in Ukraine.
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But they need to get over their bad habit of falling out of windows for that to happen. It’s almost as if someone in the window locks business is aware of the risk of a coup. 
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(posted by @anon27554371 in the Drums of war thread)
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They haven’t been nearly as vicious as the other factions in knocking off those who cross them. They were probably responsible for killing Dugin’s daughter but the GRU has mostly reserved its car bombs for oligarchs who didn’t cut them in on the loot.
Meanwhile, the FSB has been pushing people out of windows and down stairs wherever you look.
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Submariner humor: “Let’s show you the beautiful view from our front window.” Translation: Torpedo Tube Ride.
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In the “good old days” 
the CIA would have already prepared a thuggish leader readied for plug-in.
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That won? If the actual soldiers are as poorly trained, it explains a lot.
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Biden in Kyiv
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