Putin is nothing short of a deranged megalomaniac. Even worse, he is a deranged megalomaniac with nuclear weapons and seems, by putting the nuclear arsenal on special alert, quite prepared to use them.

He says he has submarines deployed around the world with 500 nuclear warheads, enough to destroy all opponents.

He is the most dangerous man in the world. He stands there, hands on hips, and dares the rest of the world to defy him. He needs to be stopped and stopped now. It’s no use tapping him on the wrist and calling him a naughty boy. Russia needs to be completely ostracised. All banks should be blocked from SWIFT, and all bank accounts not just suspended but stripped of their assets.

I know this is brutal and most of Russia do not want this war but where is he going to stop? My thoughts are that Poland will be next and then the rest of the old USSR. One of the tanks was seen to be flying the hammer and sickle flag. Doesn’t that say something?

M Horsman, Moorland Road, York

 

Ukraine was not an ‘anti-Russian state’

I was astonished to see Mike Race’s letter in Monday’s Press.

He claimed first of all that “Ukraine is not a real democracy – it’s too enmeshed in political and institutional corruption . . . ”

Has he taken a close look at the UK in recent times I wonder before calling the Ukrainian kettle black? Or is Putin’s Russia a better representative of ‘true’ democracy?

Ukraine has a complex, tragic history. A greater understanding of that history, and the consequences of the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1990 onwards, might have avoided some of the tactlessness in the west’s subsequent dealings with ‘the new Russia’.

Nevertheless, it is this new Russia, or rather Putin himself and his associates, who have chosen to throw its might against a neighbouring country which posed no conceivable threat, not least in having voluntarily given up its nuclear arsenal inherited from the Soviet Empire.

True, history has left Ukraine with a significant Russian-speaking minority coupled with a much smaller number (roughly 17.3 per cent according to the country’s 2001 census) of ethnic Russians. However, it is surely misleading to suggest that they have all been living in hell and don’t ‘want to live in an anti-Russian state’.

Tony Lawton, Skelton, York