Richard Griffiths (Letters, 11 March) suggests that “the only way forward” from the current situation is for Ukraine’s independence to be guaranteed by a treaty to be signed “between Russia and the west”. Such a treaty already exists – the 1994 Budapest memorandum on security assurances. The memorandum guaranteed Ukrainian (and Belarusian and Kazhak) sovereignty and territorial integrity, prohibited the signatories from threatening or using military force against the three former Soviet and then independent states, and required the return of Soviet-era nuclear weapons on the three nations’ territory to be returned to Russian control.
Russia has broken its obligations to Ukraine in 2014, by annexing Crimea and supporting breakaway statelets in Donbas, and by its current attack on Ukraine. It’s difficult to see how a treaty could resolve the situation when it is clear that Putin’s Russia has no intention of respecting existing treaties.
Blaine Stothard
London
• Prof Allan House (Letters, 8 March) is of course right to remind us that we all develop and assert ourselves within the social and political systems in which we exist. But he underestimates the sheer power of the narcissistic desperation that prevails among certain individuals who generate such vengeful rage against those who thwart them, way beyond the bounds set by those systems.
Putin’s delusional “madness” stands out; so does that of Trump, Hitler and Stalin, to name but a few. It is increasingly dangerous the more these individuals sail beyond the reach of their own entourage – or indeed their own reason.
Peter Wilson
Wye, Kent
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