‘Surely it is not too late to return to the negotiating table and for the West to make a compromise’

• AS a recently widowed mother of four and grandmother of three, my heart suffers deeply for Ukraine.

Like many of us I am sending what money I can to the relief fund to help displaced women and children.

However, as in the case of Vietnam and Iraq, we are not told everything.

I believe Ukraine has had a low-running civil war between Ukrainians and Russians for some eight years.

That war has now been fuelled by Russia but I feel the West has helped create this humanitarian crisis by piling arms into Ukraine.

In the end diplomacy will have to sort things out.

Without armaments Ukraine would have had little option but passive resistance, as in Czechoslovakia 1968. Quite horrendous but not a humanitarian crisis.

We have to remember that Russia has been over run at least four times, and each time invaders come in through Ukraine, because it is relatively flat. Other routes are mountainous.

In the past invasion [Hitler], Russia lost 27 million people.

Russia has a reason to demand Ukraine does not become part of NATO, and we in the West have a duty to keep our promise not to tighten the noose of NATO around Russia.

I have no access to the details of the agreement, but surely a buffer zone of neutral states, aligned not to NATO or Russia, is the way forward.

Surely it is not too late to return to the negotiating table and for the West to make a compromise.

Ukraine keeps her sovereignty and the lives of her citizens but agrees to be a neutral state, not aligned to Russia nor to NATO.

SARA WOOD,
NW3