Chickens coming home to roost in eastern Europe | Letters

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Of all the disappointments, betrayals and incompetence of Keir Starmer’s government, none is greater than the naive sycophancy shown to Donald Trump over Ukraine and much else.

So, Simon Tisdall is absolutely correct: it is high time for European nations, especially the UK, to “tell Trump to get lost” and to take far more positive action to support the Ukrainians in their resistance to Russian aggression (Ukraine is the biggest and most consequential of all the American betrayals, 21 February).

But it is not only Trump – and to an extent his predecessors – at fault. In the 1980s and 90s, when the reformers, Mikhail Gorbachev et al, were trying to bring a “new Russia” and a new European detente into being, and when subsequently the USSR collapsed, the west had the opportunity to support democratic reforms and to begin the dissolution of Nato and the Warsaw Pact.

Those of us in European Nuclear Disarmament and the wider peace movement were urging support for this embryonic reform process in eastern Europe and a peace-oriented foreign policy in western European governments.

Instead, the west facilitated the rise of “gangster capitalism” in Russia, and extended Nato’s frontier eastwards, thus enabling the rise of paranoid authoritarians, notably Vladimir Putin. Chickens are now coming home to roost.
Richard Taylor
Pooley Bridge, Cumbria

• Simon Tisdall is spot on about the American betrayal of Ukraine. In February 1939 Eleanor Rathbone, MP for the Combined English Universities constituency, defined appeasement as “a clever plan of selling your friends in order to buy off your enemies”. It is worse today. Over Greenland the US, like Russia, is acting as a predatory hegemon.
Rev Canon John Longuet-Higgins
Hartpury, Gloucestershire

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