‘Fears about Russia’s ambitions are only too real, as the invasion of Ukraine shows’

• HOW disgraceful to suggest (on the dubious pretext of some personal experience of Ukrainian people nearly 70 years ago) that Nazi sympathies somehow run through the Ukrainian people like a stick of rock and should make us think twice about accepting them as refugees, (Encirclement of Russia by NATO is the cause of war, March 17).

As for Russia feeling threatened by being surrounded by NATO members, you can’t blame people in these countries who suffered grievously from being colonised for 40 years by the Soviet Union, for seeking collective security in NATO and the European Union.

No doubt there are still many people there who remember the repression in Hungary and Czechoslovakia as well as the grinding, day-to-day misery, of living under communism. Their fears about Russia’s ambitions are only too real, as the invasion of Ukraine shows.

MARK WALTON
Calabria Road, N5