Western intervention in the Ukraine

I AM not irate but exasperated by the lack of any even-handed consideration for those caught up in a conflict that has arisen from Western electoral interventions in the Ukraine: both from inertia in Europe and as a deliberate campaign of regime change promoted by Washington. It is an historical fact, as Mr Stuart Eels writes, how many

millions of Russian peasants died of starvation during the collectivisation of farming under a Soviet governance of the 1930’s.

But then the British governance, a hundred years earlier, caused proportionately more people to starve from famine in Ireland. Is Britain’s government to be held to account and the British people forever seen as pursuing genocide?

History records Joseph Stalin as of Georgian nationality and of Slavic race, with Stalin’s successor having been the Ukrainian born Nikita Kruschev, also of Slavic race. I do not see how accusations of genocide can be made where the combatants are of the same racial group?

Nor where in the Ukraine, the Russian Federation forces deployed are considerably less than NATO employed for a couple of decades to unsuccessfully subdue the smaller sovereign country of Afghanistan?

As to Syria and Georgia: the Russian forces were negligible compared with those of the Syrian Arab Army; and the UN investigation blamed the Georgian President for the initial assault that the Russian Federation reacted to!

By the way, the Georgian president at the time went on to be a governor in the Ukraine, until arrested and imprisoned for fraud back in Georgia.

Again, from my military interests during a long life, I must observe it is a standard army practice to contain the conflagration possible in a fuel dump, as the satellite photo showed the first alleged atrocity location in Bucha to be, to dig long trenches to partially bury the oil drums within, safe from (Ukrainian) shells aimed for that facility. Inevitable casualties

from both sides would turn up for burial there if the dump were to be a position to be abandoned as happened as ordered.

It is also standard practice in negotiations of settlement, as the Ukrainian and Russian negotiators are being conducted, to allege the outrageous in order to put the other side on its back foot where you have no true military gains to fall back on. The US side has only this week revealed much of its media reporting from the Ukraine has been unsubstantiated for this very purpose. Regarding the military practices of the Roman Army two thousand years ago, both the Ukraine and Russian Federation have expressed satisfaction with today’s government in Rome in a role of guarantors of peace.

Perhaps some similar consideration for peace might be heard in the Westcountry?

(Old) Mr Benning Wellington, Somerset