Did the West create the monster?

To the Financial Times

Martin Wolf is right to say that Vladimir Putin has ignited an indefensible war against Ukraine. That it is worse than a crime is highlighted by your report on Kharkiv, described as “another Stalingrad”. You do not call Ukrainians your brothers then bomb them into submission. Whatever the war’s immediate results, Putin has ensured that Russia’s western borders become “ungovernable”. This is a dreadful legacy.

However, let’s not lose all sense of history. Russia’s desire to retain both Belarus and Ukraine as buffers between Russia and Nato is understandable: one has only to look at the map to understand why. I have never understood why the West – or Ukraine itself – has refused to give Russia the assurance that there would be no forward deployment of Nato forces on its borders. Had such promises been given, the dynamics of postcommunist Russian politics would have been very different. As Yegor Gaidar, Russia’s first post-communist PM, once said to me: “The best hope for Russian liberals is the distance of Nato from our borders.” Wolf’s piece ignores the argument that Putin “the monster” is partly a creation of Western diplomacy. Robert Skidelsky, House of Lords, London

To the Financial Times

In “Just look at the map to see Moscow’s point of view”, Robert Skidelsky asserts that had the West given assurances to Russia that there would be no forward deployment of Nato forces, then Putin would not have needed Ukraine and Belarus to be buffers between Russia and Nato’s “military alliance”. But Nato has never been a “war” alliance; it has always been a “defence” alliance, with its member nations acting “collectively” to defend against attacks on any one of its members. Therefore it is disingenuous of Skidelsky to accuse Martin Wolf of ignoring all sense of Russian history.

Ali M. El-Agraa, emeritus professor of international economic integration, Fukuoka University, Japan