No defence of Russia but Ukraine’s flaws need to be acknowledged - Yorkshire Post Letters
From: William Loneskie, Justice Park, Oxton, Lauder, Berwickshire.
Colin Moore (Letters, December 20) claims I "blame everyone but Putin" for the war in Ukraine. To put the record straight I have no illusions about Putin.
I have in my library a book by Heidi Blake entitled ‘From Russia With Blood’ which describes the 20 or so murders or attempted murders authorised by Putin on British soil, not including the murder of Dawn Sturgess and the attempted murder of the Skripals.
I am also aware of the way in which Putin has murdered his opponents within Russia, by poisoning, bombs on aircraft and people being pushed from high buildings.
If I were to write letters against the Russian government as I do here with my own I would be whisked off to some dreadful prison cell and tortured to confess to some crime or other and then jailed in a hell-hole for years.
However, as far as the war in Ukraine is concerned I am only saying the same thing as commentators like Professor Jeffry Sachs, Professor John Mearsheimer, Professor Glenn Diesen, Lieutenant-Colonel Daniel Davis, Colonel Douglas MacGregor, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Lieutenant-Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, and former CIA analysts Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern.
Which is that the war really began in 2014; that Russia feared nuclear weapons on its border; that Ukraine is losing on the battlefield right along the line of contact; that the Russian armed forces have broken through most of Ukraine's fortresses; that Ukraine has lost hundreds of thousands of men on the battlefield and through desertion and is now scraping the bottom of the barrel; and that if Zelensky and his associates do not agree to Trump's plan that the Russian speaking provinces will be recognised as part of the Russian Federation and that Ukraine will be neutral state and not a member of NATO, then the war will continue and Ukraine will lose even more men and more territory including Odessa which would mean it would become a landlocked country.
Alas, Zelensky ordering the sinking of oil tankers in the Black Sea and now in the Mediterranean makes the latter more likely.