Whatever happens, pyrotechnic Putin is now Vladimir the vaunted. “We underestimated Prigozhin but now we’ve clearly overestimated Putin,” Tatyana Stanovaya, founder of the Russian political consultancy, R.Politik, wrote in Telegram, a Russian media site. “This is a very powerful defeat for him.” It may seem a bizarre source for advice, but Putin should have heeded the warning made 100 years before his first incursions into Ukraine by Grigory Rasputin, the “mad monk” who inveigled his way into Russia’s corridors of power during the final, chaotic years of Tsar Nicholas II’s reign. Rasputin warned the Tsar not to mobilise his forces...