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.
