One Chechen view was: 'If we had wanted to bomb Moscow, we would have blown up the Kremlin or a nuclear power station. Why should we blow up a couple… - John Sweeney

I am a sixty-three-year-old war reporter. I have covered wars and madness in Rwanda, Burundi, apartheid South Africa, the Romanian revolution, former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, Albania, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Zimbabwe. I have seen babies with hacked limbs and an old man with his eyes blown in by an artillery shell and people with their lungs sucked inside out and a man with his brain sliced with a machete – and there is nothing worse than watching kids smile in war, watching the aristocracy of the human soul. It makes me cry – and cry I do.

So why did Prigozhin stop dead? My working hypothesis is that the secret police got to Prigozhin's family. For example, if his grandchildren had been kidnapped, then that might well have forced him to call off his mutiny. In return, the word on the street was, Prigozhin and his lieutenants would be granted immunity because of their previous heroics. But would Putin honour his word?

What was the value to the West of Ceausescu's dissent from Moscow's diktat? Was it of inestimable worth? Or was it, in fact, a marginal propaganda gain of little real substance? Ceausescu was an irritant to the Russians, but they never felt threatened by him. They did march their troops up and down near the Romanian border when Ceausescu was visiting China in 1971; but they invaded Czechoslovakia when the Prague spring got out of hand. The difference is clear. Dubček challenged the communist system. Ceausescu never did. He was not, then, a serious 'enemy of my enemy'. The West misread the cards.