Don’t blame Russians for Putin’s actions

Shame on The Baltimore Sun for printing the hate-filled letter, “Russian citizens bear responsibility for Putin’s actions,” (March 21). Raising the level of xenophobia in the United States as the letter does and as we experienced during the Trump administration, only leads to heightened violence and even death of our fellow citizens of foreign descent.

As for the citizens of a country “suffering the consequences” of their government’s “murderous conduct” abroad when it “flagrantly violates international law and indiscriminately kills innocent civilians,” let us not forget the millions of Vietnamese killed in our name in the 1960s and ‘70s; or the Central American death squads paid for by our tax dollars in the 1980s; or the destruction of Middle Eastern civilization and peoples due to a lie told to us in 2003 about an impending “mushroom cloud,” to name a few examples. Our troops and their families have certainly suffered the consequences, but we as a nation have never paid reparations to the countries we have destroyed.

Far better for The Sun to print positive letters that offer a solution to today’s tense international situation, like the one by Charlie Cooper, printed on the same page as the hate-filled letter, that reminds us that while 56 nations have signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the U.S. and Russia have not. Let us, for starters, call our congresspersons to sign that treaty and while we are at it, tell them we want diplomacy, not more weapons build-up in Ukraine.

— Margaret Baldridge, Govans