SELECTIVITY is the essence of propaganda and Alan Stephen (Letters, October 14), clambers aboard the anti-Putin propaganda band wagon where any kind of assorted baggage is carried by those anxious to journey on it.

Atrocities aren’t exclusive to any single country or collection of countries.

Likewise there has been relatively low-level media coverage of the bombing of the Kunduz, Afghanistan, hospital run by Hospitals Without Frontiers, but much focus on Russian air action in Syria – action incidentally approved by the Syrian government, whereas similar action by British and US air forces has been will-nilly enacted without asking anybody, not even the Westminster parliament.

It is always easier to direct “bad things” at foreign people rather than one’s own because it is not the habit of governments to foster ‘bad things’ about their own countries – few, if any, countries ever do this.

However, by the passage of time, historians in particular are able to sort out such distortions and imbalances as presided over events at the time of their happening.

Same applies to the viewpoint, now an historical cliché in the west, that Russia deliberately withheld intervention during the Warsaw Uprising in the Second World War. Seldom is the accusation afforded that, a few years previously, both Britain and France did nothing when Hitler’s Third Reich forces overran Poland though they were signatories to a treaty committing them to action. The inaction had been even worse before that in regard to Czechoslovakia which was devoured in two quick mouthfuls by the Hitler regime. But, later, when the USSR - Russia - did likewise, this engendered reams of disapproval and condemnation which continue to this day.

Ian Johnstone,

84 Forman Drive, Peterhead.