Letters: Ukraine has been betrayed by the UK and the US

If Mr Jack is searching for naivety, then the real naivety was in the UK and US (not Nato) signing up as guarantors of the Budapest Memorandum, which proposed security and territorial protection for Ukraine (and Belarus and Kazakhstan) in return for giving up their nuclear weapons. Ukraine was betrayed by the duplicity of the UK and the US in not standing firm against Russian aggression in 2014, and the West in general for allowing Vladimir Putin and his gang decades in which to plunder Russian resources, enriching themselves and stashing their loot abroad (much of it in London).

There can be no happy outcome for any of us in this debacle.

GR Weir, Ochiltree.

WHERE WILL NATO DRAW A LINE?

WHEN confronted by a bully it is not a good strategy to immediately declare that you will never fight back.

Not making such a declaration does not mean one condones violence, or intends to use violence, irrespective of the views, politically motivated or otherwise, of some less objective letter-writers to The Herald when referencing recent comment of the First Minister on not ruling out a no-fly zone over Ukraine whatever the circumstances that may arise.

Of course no sensible person wishes to see the disastrous conflict in the Ukraine escalate, but when Russia is now talking about use of chemical weapons it would seem either arrogant or naïve to presume that Vladimir Putin will not continue to further test the boundaries of Nato’s common military resolve, which in turn will result in many more people suffering the dire consequences of war.

Finland is not a member of Nato, so would those criticising the comment of Nicola Sturgeon suggest that Nato now declare that as long as that remains the case it will not declare a no-fly zone over Finland. If you lived in Finland would you be grateful for such a declaration at this time?

Stan Grodynski, Longniddry.

KYIV SHOULD OFFER CONCESSIONS

UKRAINIANS are dying by the hundred. If war continues they may die in tens or hundreds of thousands. Nato sees the risks of conventional or nuclear world war as too great to intervene. So Nato governments should stop encouraging Ukraine’s government not to give an inch in negotiations with Russia, and persuade it to offer concessions instead.

Nato governments demand Russia hand back Crimea. There’s even less chance of this happening than the US handing Guantanamo Bay back to Cuba, or the UK returning Gibraltar to Spain. The base is too strategically important.

The annexation followed the 2014 Maidan revolution, which overthrew a government which Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) election observers said was democratically elected, and replaced it with a mixture of centrists, nationalists and neo-nazis wanting trade deals and alliances with the EU and Nato rather than Russia.

Vladimir Putin is a dictator and war criminal. But the idea that any Russian government would accept this quietly was always fantasy.

Nor has Ukraine since 2014 been entirely peaceful or democratic, despite mostly free elections since. The Myrotovorets (Peacemaker) website run by a former member of Ukraine’s SBU security services publishes the names and addresses of anyone disagreeing with hard-line Ukrainian nationalists’ views, labelling them traitors. Most get death threats. Some are murdered by far right Ukrainian groups. The Ukrainian Government, far from stopping the website, has accepted it as evidence in more than 100 court cases.

Refusing any compromise will guarantee more deaths from war and civil war.

Nato should persuade President Zelenskyy to offer Ukrainian neutrality and formal ceding of Crimea to Russia, both demands recently made by Russia in negotiations. This might get a peace deal. Only something President Putin can claim as at least partial victory could work. Even a temporary peace would give millions of Ukrainian civilians a chance to escape, and European Nato members time to re-arm and deploy more forces to Eastern Europe. If President Putin rejected it, more Russians might turn against the war and his leadership.

Duncan McFarlane, Carluke.

BREXIT IS STILL ASTONISHING

I AGREE entirely with the sentiments expressed in today’s letters (March 11) regarding the UK's treatment of Ukrainian refugees. Inhumane.

I am convinced that part of the UK Establishment’s response is due to the fact that our country has not been invaded by a foreign power in our collective recent memory. Contrast this with Poland, whose memories of the Second World War are passed down through generations.

I dread to think what the situation would be like if Poland, and Ukraine’s other near neighbours, had responded to the flood of refugees in the same way as the UK has.

In the same way, our European neighbours see the sense of remaining in the EU, imperfect as it is. They remain astonished at our decision to leave. As do I.

Willie Towers, Alford.

A WAY TO HIT BACK AT RUSSIA

VLADIMIR Putin lays claim to Ukraine, saying that it was never a country in its own right.

There is an unnamed enclave on the Baltic coast between Poland and Lithuania whose largest city is Kaliningrad. It is half the size of Belgium and was taken from Germany and given to the USSR at the Potsdam Conference in 1945. It has remained in Russia’s hands even after the break-up of the USSR.

It has no historical connection and no common border with Russia. It is connected by road and rail links that run through Lithuania. Isn’t it time that Europe took a stance here and restricted the flow of supplies to the soldiers based in the enclave?

Alan McGibbon, Paisley.

* HOW prescient was Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his amazing Warning to the West, when he said: “I am not a critic of the West; I am a critic of the weakness of the West. I am a critic of a fact we can't comprehend: how one can lose one's spiritual strength, one's willpower and possessing freedom, not value it, not be willing to make sacrifices for it.”

Doug Clark, Currie.

EV CHARGING CANNOT PAY

WITH the cost of petrol and diesel rising rapidly and our Government hoping to rid our roads of fossil-fuelled vehicles by 2030, drivers will be expected to move over to electrically-powered vehicles (EVs). This will be exceedingly difficult, simply because those EVs have to be refuelled (charged) more often than traditional vehicles and have a shorter range.

Here are the mathematics of the enormity of the charging problems involved:

Let's say that a current petrol station has five pumps and each pump can fill a family car with petrol every five minutes. This means that the garage owner, who trades for, say, 15 hours each day, can have 900 customers.

Move forward to 2030: the petrol pumps will have been replaced by EV chargers.

The best chargers for EVs often need 45 minutes to give a full charge, so each of the five charging points in the above premises might accommodate only 20 clients per day, a total of only 100 EVs.

If 900 petrol cars once used that garage daily in 2022, and only 100 EV owners can in 2030, then 800 car owners will have to look elsewhere for fuel ... or the garage has to install 40 more charging points.

As a further complication, there are currently six different types of coupling for EV charging points.

By 2030 more than 30 million UK car owners will not only be looking for the car of their dreams, but for a place with suitable chargers to charge it, but without long queues.

Archibald A Lawrie, Kingskettle, Fife.

* DAVID Clubb (Letters, March 10) claims that energy storage can solve the problem of the tides either producing too much or too little energy at any given moment. He needs to realise that the UK consumes between 1,400,000 and 1,800,000 GWh (gigawatt hours) of energy annually depending on how we account for it, but we currently only have around 30 GWh of storage and this miniscule amount cost billions at today's prices.

How on earth could we scale up storage by several orders of magnitude?

Geoff Moore, Alness.

STORM WARNING FOR ARDROSSAN

THANK you, Charlie Gibson, for the shot of a storm-tossed Ardrossan Harbour (Picture of the Day, The Herald, March 11)

This is why historically the winter service to Arran operated from Fairlie Pier.

This is why from the start of the roll-on-roll-off service from the early 1970s the ferry often sailed to Gourock without missing a day.

This why the the "new" Glen Sannox is unlikely to provide a reliable service to Brodick, without the Gourock port of refuge.

This is why a glorious, new passenger terminal at Ardrossan, with nice trees and seats, will not be full value for money.

And this is why the whole clamjamphrie of bureaucrats in any way connected with managing and building for the Arran lifeline ferry service need to exorcise the naivety from their thinking.

James M Arnold, Whiting Bay, Isle of Arran.

THE SUM OF ALL SIR'S FEARS

THE story about the precocious talent of James Clerk Maxwell (Letters, March 11) reminds me of the story about another genius, Carl Friedrich Gauss. Whilst at primary school, it is said that his primary teacher, desiring a period of respite, set the class the problem of adding every number from 1 to 100. Young Gauss realised that if he added pairs of numbers from the opposite ends of the list, namely 100 + 1, 99 + 2, 98 +3 and so on down to 1 + 100, he would get the answer 101 on 100 occasions, a total of 10,100. As he had added the list twice, the answer to the problem would be half of that.

A few seconds after his teacher had set the task, Gauss gave the correct answer of 5,050. This not only astonished his teacher, it also ended his hope of a rest.

Brian Logan, Glasgow.