Wagner leader’s abortive mutiny was an irrevocable step that may yet have serious consequences
Oleksandr Syrskyi, the head of Ukraine’s ground troops, told the Guardian last week about his love of studying ancient Greek and Roman warfare: reading Plutarch, for example, or thinking about the battle of Cannae, in which an outnumbered north African force under Hannibal all but annihilated a huge Roman army in southern Italy.
Perhaps this weekend, when considering the mutiny of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner group, his mind will have turned briefly towards a seemingly obvious Roman parallel: Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon and marching of his troops into Italy.
