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.