Few nations have as deep a sense of their own history as the Russians. Indeed, it was on the basis of a tendentious tract about the historic 'unity' of Russians and Ukrainians that President Putin justified his invasion of an independent neighbouring state.

But another word, also with great resonance in Russian history, now hangs over the Kremlin's flailing military campaign. And that word is: Mutiny.

Remarkably, it was raised on Moscow's main TV channel last week by the woman described as Putin's propagandist-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, during the nightly discussion programme on the state of the 'special military operation'.

The striking-looking Simonyan is the head of RT, the Kremlin's English-language broadcasting network (now banned in the UK); but here she was speaking to a Russian audience.

She was raging about the incompetence with which Putin's 'partial mobilisation', announced on September 21, was being carried out, and the gross inadequacy of the provisions being supplied to the hundreds of thousands being called up to fight: 'Students, people with serious illnesses, single mothers, people as old as 62 . . . and being handed rotten things, no helmets or body armour.'

Criticism

She warned the heads of the armed forces: 'Comrade Commanders: don't anger the people!'

And now came the reference to historic precedent. Simonyan told the 'commanders' to remember the mutiny on the Battleship Potemkin during the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, which was provoked by the fact that all the meat available to the crew had been maggot-infested.

'Let me remind you that in 1905, small things like that led to the first mutiny of an entire military unit in the history of our country. Is that what you want?'

She exempted Putin from all criticism, of course, and praised her ultimate boss for taking 'the very heavy load of responsibility solely upon himself'. I doubt that would have comforted the increasingly deluded occupant of the Kremlin.

Like the invasion of Ukraine, the 1905 Russo-Japanese war saw the much larger country suffer from a series of blunders based on an exaggerated sense of its own military capability — and, to some astonishment, the Japanese won.

The Potemkin mutiny was put down, but the privations and humiliations linked to that conflict led to uprisings in Russia itself — known as the 1905 Revolution. The result was that the Tsar was forced to concede political reforms, including the inauguration of multi-party elections.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks saw the Potemkin mutiny as an inspiration for their own seizure of power in 1917.