Sir, – Geoffrey Roberts (Letters, February 18th) states that “Fintan O’Toole misunderstands Spain’s history and the grim realities of the Russo-Ukrainian war”. I believe Roberts misunderstands the grim realities of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and what history has taught us about the dangers of appeasement in the face of dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler.
In 2014 Russia invaded the Crimean Peninsula of Ukraine, occupied it and annexed it after an illegitimate referendum. This marked the beginning of Russia’s war against Ukraine and the first step in Putin’s ambition of restoring Crimea initially and eventually all of Ukraine to Russia.
The reaction of the United Nations to the illegal annexation of Crimea was the passing of a non-binding declaration that declared Crimea’s Moscow-backed referendum invalid. There followed a whole series of UN, UK and European-based sanctions against Russia, which Putin ignored.
In August 2014, Putin ruled out pushing beyond Crimea. However, on February 24th, 2022, Putin invaded Ukraine from the north, the east and the south. By April 2022 the invasion’s initial goal of a rapid Russian victory had failed, with Ukraine pushing back the northern arm of the invasion and preventing the capture of Kyiv – a key objective of Putin.
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The statement by Roberts that “absent western intervention in the conflict, the war could have ended within weeks of the invasion and on terms more favourable to Kyiv than those it is being forced to accept four years later” is naive. Yes, without western intervention the war may have ended earlier, but it would have resulted in Russia taking Kyiv, and Putin would have succeeded in his aim of not just taking the republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, but in installing a puppet regime in Ukraine and taking full control of the country. The inaction of the West following the 2014 invasion of Crimea emboldened Putin to invade in 2022. – Yours, etc,
CONOR O’MALLEY,
Blackrock,
Co Dublin.
