The Wagner mutiny has left Putin dangerously exposed

AFTER Vladimir Putin was anointed as Russia’s president at the end of 1999, he compared the first post-Soviet decade to , the time of troubles—the uprisings, famine and invasions of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, before the rise of the Romanovs. He was casting Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first democratically elected president, as Boris Godunov, the Russian regent, and himself as the beginning of a new line of tsars, promising stability, prosperity and the restoration of the state.