Dear editor:

Many of us are the last survivors of Second World War illegal occupations of innocent countries by Russia in particular.

As a "gratuity" for Russian assistance in crushing the Nazis, the Western powers sacrificed a dozen countries to Russia, and such sacrifice continues today with China as well allowed to take over countries at will.

Of course, I'll grant you that Russia played a major role in saving the west by throwing masses of manpower at the German military and it had absolutely enormous losses.

That it was owed some form of reparation I also acknowledge. Such reparation might have been Russia being a more major member of the Marshall Plan to help rebuild Europe, for example.

But, instead, the west, engulfed again by China in Korea, tired of war and quite rightly so (the people of the west, not the war machine corporations, of course) set Russia up as a "Communist Evil Empire" and began a Cold War of mutual military build-up including nuclear weapons.

Russia's response was to surround its territory with buffer nations and, unfortunately, Estonia and Latvia were both on that list, still are today. By that I mean if Russia today took over both our countries overnight, there is nothing the rest of the world would do about it.

Hence Ukraine, where Russia is being allowed to literally wreck a whole country with a horrible death count and destroyed infrastructure, rendering it useless for economic gain and leaving it solely as a buffer, ostensibly against western military incursion.

That also is nonsense because the west has had no intention of such incursion, so effectively the whole world is dealing with a madman named Putin whose megalomania is unbounded and who is leading his own country to potential ruin.

There is no good endgame here. There is no good path to resolution here before an endgame.

What we are seeing is a complete global lack of moral fibre and Canada is one of the leading contenders of banal verbiage reflecting basically a complete willingness to allow Russia full rein to do literally whatever it wants with Ukraine.

No doubt, not too far down the line, if Putin remains in power, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland and others could be in imminent danger. Look what he already has done in Crimea, Belarus and elsewhere.

It's almost as if a mechanism of some sort has its dial turned up toward mankind's most vile self and an inevitability has set in.

I do hope for some sort of a new wave, a new way of thinking, before the sweep of malevolent history drowns us all like a tsunami.

Kaspar Pold

NOTL