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Good Morning News that a private army of mercenaries was driving up the M4 grabbed the world’s attention. The army wasn’t invading Wales, they were heading for the Russian capital, in defiance of their paymaster, Vladimir Putin. The unfolding events were so dynamic, some predicted the fall of the Russian President by yesterday. It didn’t seem to matter the mercenary leader Progozhin – a man who had a mallet for a symbol - was the possible instrument of change. Few had a concept of what this self-proclaimed dog of war might unleash, but many were willing him to take Moscow. Even Russians were saying that Putin had created Progozhin, so let the dog bite his master. Or, as Jesus puts it, ‘He who lives by the sword’... The situation briefly gave permission for some to imagine a Russia freed from years of tyranny, and an immediate end to the war with Ukraine. So it felt almost disappointing when Progozhin confirmed he’d cut a deal with Putin to head to Belarus and turn his army back, when only a couple of hours from Moscow. When Napoleon’s army turned back from Moscow, the retreat was vividly described by Tolstoy in his novel, War and Peace. In it he observes that the Russian army won because they knew what they were fighting for. This time it seems different. Progozhin’s insurrection has raised a question for the Russian people who – unlike their Ukrainian counterparts – don’t always appear to know what this war is for. Progozhin’s actions have also exposed something people thought but dare not test: that Putin is not as powerful as he wants the world to believe. The curtain on the Wizard was pulled back just enough to see that the levers used to create the illusion of power are being pulled by a man who, in his broadcast, looked more afraid than in control. As Tolstoy, who himself moved from soldier to pacifist, from doubt to faith, later wrote: ‘the misery of nations is caused when people find themselves in the power of a man who – perverted by his unnatural position as arbiter of the fate of millions - is always in an unhealthy state, suffering a mania of self-aggrandizement.’ Just outside the United Nations there is a sculpture by Russian artist Evgeniy Vuchetich, depicting a dynamic figure beating a sword into a plough with a mallet. Given in 1957 at the height of the Cold War, it is called Let Us Beat Swords Into Ploughshares, a tangible expression of the prophet Isaiah’s great cry for peace. Let us hope that in the coming hours, days and months, Russians and Ukrainians will be free to see their tanks being beaten into tractors, their artillery into art, and that after eighteen months of war they can make, and break, bread in peace once more.