It seems that Mikhail Shishkin is, in effect, telling us all that we must prepare for a third world war (The west is trying to quietly forget the war in Ukraine. It does so at its own peril, 21 August). To take that route would be to demonstrate not courageous and necessary resolve, but sheer, pitiless madness.
History may demonstrate many things, but when it ignores current realities it is, to say the least, dangerous. This time the global deaths would not stop at the 70 million who died during the second world war, but would, with or without the almost inevitable use of nuclear weapons, destroy our planet. We are already well on our way to extinction through terminal climate disaster. And that is already being brought closer by the ecological cost of the terrible destruction in Ukraine: the smashing of buildings and infrastructure and the devastation of land, and the carbon cycle of the manufacture and use of the weapons deployed by both sides.
Another way must be found. It will start with negotiations, whose inevitably less-than-satisfactory outcomes must be made acceptable and credible by international commitment to transforming global relationships and priorities. That may sound like pie in the sky, but at least it carries a grain of hope.
Diana Francis
Bath
• Mikhail Shishkin is right – tragically so. The free world must wake up to the threat from Russia – and not merely to Ukraine, but to liberty everywhere. Support should move from present levels to near unconditional. Let the new prime minister place our country on a quasi-war footing. It would enable her or him to raise awareness of the Russian threat but also enact urgent economic measures – such as action on energy bills – without being accused of breaching one economic orthodoxy or another.
My wife and I are refugees from Ukraine, and have also experienced the dismaying process of newspaper coverage of the war slowly diminishing. But this is an emergency. Ukrainian liberty is indivisible from our own.
Mike Martin
Abingdon, Oxfordshire
• Mikhail Shishkin ends his argument by saying that instead of “nice holidays, European voters must steel themselves for sacrifice, struggle and hardship” as the price of peace. Who is he kidding? Most English voters have no interest in the rather more proximate Northern Ireland issue, never mind far-off Eurasia. British voters need to steel themselves and the government against involving the British state in any way in any war which poses no fundamental political or economic threat to us.
Who in the UK really cares whether Ukraine is reintegrated into the Russian empire? Certainly not enough to make the real sacrifices, the “blood, toil, tears and sweat” that Shishkin refers to. The conflict is being used as a scapegoat for the failure of successive British governments to build a successful economy, as well as to mask the failure of Brexit. Of course we should continue to provide a safe haven for Ukrainians who have fled the conflict. But the British should be concentrating on sorting out our own mess, meeting the needs of the British people, and minding our own business in future foreign affairs.
Adrian Quinn
Caldicot, Monmouthshire
• When are our leaders going to wake up to the fact that we are at war? There may have been no formal declaration and we are not involved in direct fighting. However, I think one of the few things our government and most of the British people would agree upon is that we do not want Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine to succeed. This is not a matter of altruism – there is a justifiable fear that Russian imperial ambition does not end with Ukraine.
The consequences of this war for our food and energy security are already clear, and compare with our situation when supplies were disrupted in the second world war. In 1940, the solution was found in a rationing scheme that avoided mass starvation and prioritised petrol supplies for essential services. Essential industries were supported and munitions production increased. A coalition government was formed with a war cabinet of the best people from different parties.
At present we seem to lack leaders with the necessary intelligence and integrity to do the job. If they don’t get this together quickly, I fear that we will face a winter when starving people riot in the streets and shameful calls on Ukraine to capitulate grow louder.
Caroline Mozley
York
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