The Ukraine crisis highlights our outsider status in Europe

There’s war in Europe and the Tory priority is producing soundbites. Look at yesterday’s disastrous photo opportunity that saw Johnson in Poland, trying to distract attention away from the European parliament where Johnson has excluded himself and the UK from an address by president Volodymyr Zelensky to Europe. We have left ourselves outside looking in.

Those of us who warned that the EU had played a vital role in peace in Europe for all of my 76 years were shouted down with cries of “project fear”. Well, I was frightened then and I’m really frightened now. Putin was aware of the importance of the EU but fortunately, our decision to leave did not cause the disintegration Putin hoped for.

We must act as one with the EU to stop Russian attacks from the air now.

John Simpson

Ross on Wye

Should British sport and sporting events cut ties with Russian sports and investments?

Well, my stance over the years is that sport and politics ought to be kept separate; however, the current cataclysmic events in Ukraine have changed my opinion. The illegal and deadly war being waged against the Ukrainian people is obscene.

I would back, with the exception of nuclear weapons, peaceful means of bringing this war to an end. This is a war of the delusional Mr Putin’s making.

World leaders have allowed Putin to kill people inside and outside Russia for simply voicing critical opinions of his policies. Tragic events in Chechnya and Crimea have shown just how ruthless this emboldened and unhinged warlord has become.

If denying sporting representation round the world brings an end to his reign terror, then it will be a positive move to make. Unfortunate for the athletes, but a price worth paying.

Keith Poole

Basingstoke

In 1962, at the age of 18, I had just started my working life as a civil servant at an ordnance factory in west Scotland. I well recall the utter fear and dread that we were to be engulfed in a nuclear war, as the Soviet Union threatened to place its weapons on Cuba. It was a very tense time. How relieved we were when Kennedy held firm and the Soviets backed off.

In the interim, I was an RAF officer and “Cold War Warrior” of sorts based at the easternmost RAF base in Germany, and only too conscious of what we faced from the Soviet Union in the early 70s.

Sixty years on and I am more afraid than I was in 1962. The Soviet Union, whatever its faults, was “governed” by the Politburo – not exactly elected but not without power. Today’s Russia is apparently ruled by one man, whose advisers owe him unquestioning loyalty bought by gifts of money, privilege and status.

Thus it is that he is able to invade Ukraine in the pursuit of recreating the beginnings of an illusory Soviet empire. He may even succeed. Next will be Moldova and Georgia, non-Nato states whom we “cannot” defend.

Might drone-launched missiles, initiated from outside Ukraine airspace help to mitigate the effects of this disgraceful invasion?

Richard Lloyd

Dunfermline

The Independent’s leader on Tuesday ends by saying: “No one believes that he is going to wipe, say, Chicago off the face of the earth with thermonuclear weapons just because Russia’s gold reserves have been frozen and Aeroflot can no longer fly into Brussels.”

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But little more than a week ago hardly anyone believed that Putin would attack Ukraine.

We can only hope that more balanced minds than Putin’s have some control over the Russian nuclear button.

Susan Alexander

Frampton Cotterell, South Gloucestershire

Nice to see the speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, getting animated over the result of a boxing match.

He seemed less animated last Wednesday when Caroline Lucas was suffering what was borderline misogynist bullying at the hands of Tory MPs, just because she was going to ask an awkward question of the prime minister.

His patronising request for her to get on with asking her question when she was continually being shouted down summed up what a pathetic stooge he has become for Boris Johnson. I am ashamed to think that he is a fellow Lancastrian.

A Sutton

York