This is the best summary I could come up with:
While his death has still not been confirmed, it would be an unsurprising end for a man often labelled as Russia’s most prominent warlord who had dared stage a mutiny against Vladimir Putin in the midst of the ongoing war against Ukraine.
Earlier in July, Prigozhin shocked the Kremlin and the world after he captured Rostov-on-Don and staged a march on Moscow, and it wasn’t long before his mutiny inspired commentators to draw parallels with episodes from Ancient Rome.
Rather than drawing explicit correlations, which might fray under scrutiny, it might be better to explain how “warlordism” contributed to the disintegration of the Roman Empire in the West.
The 5th-century historiographer Orosius, for instance, at one point drew up a catalogue of “usurpers and dissident commanders”, the latter essentially equating to what we would see as warlords today.
Thirdly: with the emperor becoming a ceremonial figurehead, the senatorial aristocracy saw their chance to renege on contributing taxes thus depriving the government of funds it needed to defend the Empire.
We might not need direct comparisons with the disintegration of the western Roman empire to understand the political and military crisis in contemporary Russia.
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I don’t think that the situation is that similar.
Rome ran into a situation where whoever could buy off the military, or enough of the military, could get power.
But in this case, we haven’t really seen offers to the military or them switching sides to whoever puts forward the best deal. In fact, as I recall someone pointing out, Russia hasn’t really historically been much subject to military coups.
