Over at Unherd, Edward Luttwak writes on the Wagner Group’s aborted rebellion, basically endorsing mercenary group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s assessment of senior military commanders like Sergei Shoigu: They are ineffective toadies of Putin, employed where they are because they cannot threaten the czar. Here are his final predictions, which I take seriously:

In the coming days, Prigozhin will be captured or killed. Any trial would compound Putin’s colossal embarrassment. The reason he must fail is that, in Russia, he falls into a specific category: like Yemelyan Pugachev, who rebelled against Catherine the Great in 1773, Prigozhin has no power base in Moscow, let alone in the military and security establishment he has so savagely ridiculed.

Yet there is also a lesson in this for Putin: if he does not fire Shoigu and Gerasimov and start anew with leaders plucked from the smart younger officers who have emerged in recent fighting, he will have to abandon the war that has become Russia’s misfortune.