I am embarrassed to be represented by this government – aren’t you?

Wow! The Home Office has granted 50 visas to refugees from Ukraine, and these only under a limited set of qualifying criteria. This is utterly shameful, and does nothing to reflect well on ambitions to be “Global Britain”. The people fleeing Ukraine for their lives need help, not a set of hoops to jump through. I am embarrassed to be represented by such a narrow-minded government which plumbs this new depth of inhumanity, coming on top of the still unresolved Windrush scandal and the continuing resistance on principle to asylum seekers trying to cross the Channel.

Charles Wood

Birmingham

Last summer, Boris Johnson was asked if he supported members of England’s football team “taking the knee” at the Euro championship in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Johnson replied: “I don’t believe in gestures. I believe in substance.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has created 1.5 million refugees in just 10 days, but home secretary Priti Patel has issued a total of 50 visas to Ukrainians during the war. It seems to me that Patel maintains her inhuman “hostile environment” against asylum-seekers, refugees and immigrants even in the face of the calamity that has befallen the Ukrainian people.

Meanwhile, Boris Johnson’s front door at 10 Downing Street has been lit up in the blue and yellow colours of Ukraine’s flag...

Sasha Simic

London

It is perplexing how Arabic people are viewing western reactions to the plight of Ukranians in comparison with their Palestinian brethren as another example of double standard and prejudice. It is true that Palestinians and Ukranians have endured warfare, persecution, death, displacement, poverty, spiking homelessness, racial discrimination, mental distress, environmental degradation and harassment.

However, so far the west hasn’t helped Ukranians apart from supplying them with lethal arms. They even admitted the impossibility of a no-fly zone. In a nutshell, like Palestinians before, the west has left Ukranians to endure Russian wrath alone. With a friend like this, who needs an enemy?

Dr Munjed Farid Al Qutob

London

Old Ukrainian proverb: the bigger the dog, the bigger the crap.

Bożena Wisz

London

By now we all know that any business contacts with Putin help to bolster and encourage his criminal war machine, nevertheless, here in Ireland, we have so far failed to enact legislation that would allow us to seize assets held by Putin’s oligarchs in shell companies in the IFSC.

So, are we content to become complicit in war crimes and in the possible extension of the war in the Ukraine into neighbouring states which, of course, would mean an inevitable nuclear confrontation? Surely the EU and UK’s failure to seize all Russian oligarch assets, together with the EU wide hesitancy in imposing a ban on imports of Russian oil runs the very serious risk of giving Putin time to overrun the Ukraine? Then, emboldened by his success and our delay in imposing sanctions, he may consider the possibility of invading some of the smaller Baltic states, thus provoking a nuclear confrontation with Nato.

One excuse advanced for not passing legislation to allow us seize assets in oligarch shell companies, is the fact that we need a “money message” to allow us to do so and this could take weeks. A second excuse is that any speeding up of said “money message” here could “create a dangerous precedent”.

People who advance these two excuses for inaction don’t seem to realise that time may be in very short supply for both the Ukrainian people and the rest of Europe. European governments were late confronting Covid. Are they going to be too late now with using the one weapon that can defeat Putin: finance? If so, what will be the likely consequence?

Bill Sullivan

Cork

What can be done about the despot Putin and his band of evil henchmen as they seek to annihilate the Ukrainian people? The way it is going at present, once he has finished with the country itself and installed Russians throughout the land, he will almost certainly arrest everyone of Ukrainian origin throughout Russia and its minion states and slaughter them as well.

Putin and his regime are no better than the Nazis and Stalin combined. Where are the sane-minded Russians? If they cared about their fellow human beings they would have risen up by now and put an end to the mass murderers that govern what was once a great nation.

David Janes

Nottingham