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Letters March 3: Russian citizens are not to blame; fossil fuels a key driver for conflict

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Police officers detain a woman in St. Petersburg, Russia, last week. Shocked Russians have turned out by the thousands to decry their country's invasion of Ukraine as emotional calls for more protests grow on social media. DMITRI LOVETSKY, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Demonize Russia’s leader, not its people

As emotions are running high all over the world, it is my hope that the Russian people, who are no different than the Ukrainians and only want peace, will not be demonized, by some hotheads, because of the criminal act incited by Putin.

I’m ashamed of my species.

Gunther Ostermann
Parksville

Fossil fuels help drive global conflict

While watching in horror as events unfold in Ukraine, it occurs to me that there is an additional great reason to stop global warming; if we get off fossil fuels, there will be far fewer international conflicts.

For decades, wars have been caused, or made worse, by our reliance on fossil fuels. Conflicts often revolve around where oil and gas are produced and used and transportation routes in between.

Currently, sanctions against Russia are compromised by the fact that much of Europe relies on oil and gas from Russia, and worldwide there is fear of rising oil and gas prices if the Russian supply is no longer available. Renewable energy sources are far more evenly distributed throughout the world. (The sun shines almost everywhere.) Almost any community can produce its own power locally through renewables. (Think solar, wind, geothermal, tidal….)

Let’s move quickly to solve climate change and create world peace.

Jane Welton
Saanich

Refugee status a tool of last resort

I feel that the government is right to accept refugees from Ukraine. However, it should not be an all-expense-paid vacation on the taxpayers’ back.

I would grant two options. The refugees can find private sponsors, or they can go tree-planting to defray the cost. Fleeing from a country should be the tool of last resort, not a preference. For this reason I would allow the refugee families to live in tents, not give them condos or free hotel rooms. Look, our own citizens are left to sleep in the streets. I would also ask that they return home when the dust settles.

Sean Murray
Victoria

PM should take pride in Trump attacks

So the racist, homophobic misogynist and dangerous narcissist Donald Trump has taken some shots at Justin Trudeau. This is not surprising coming from a man who tried to violently overturn a democratic election in his own country, just like his good friend, Vladimir Putin, is currently undertaking in the Ukraine. Let us not forget that Trump called Putin “smart” and “a genius” at the commencement of the Russian invasion.

I digress a bit. If I could talk to the prime minister, I would tell him that if Donald Trump and his howling supporters don’t like him, he should wear that as a badge of honour.

Terry McTeer
Central Saanich

Headlines reflect the troubled times

Re: “Brutal act of war,” Feb. 25.

The TC’s extra-large heading of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reminded me of my father, E. Norman Smith, writing the front-page banner proclaiming the start of the First World War.

As editor/publisher of the Ottawa Free Press on that day in July 1914, he wrote, in even larger letters than the TC’s recent banner:

HELL’S LET LOOSE!

In red letters, two inches tall.

Let’s pray that such prescience will not prevail today.

That front page was subsequently framed and hung on the wall of the newsroom of the Ottawa Journal, with which the Free Press amalgamated shortly after that “war to end all wars.”

I stared at that framed banner during my three decades at the Journal in Ottawa … until that day in August 1980 when the Journal in Ottawa and the Tribune in Winnipeg were shut down simultaneously by the Thomson and Southam newspaper chains.

Ross Smith
Victoria

NATO needs to get tough on Putin

Russian President Putin, a quintessential narcissist, has become completely unhinged. I believe that one way to stop the escalation and spread of violence and human suffering is to position NATO forces on the Russian borders with Latvia and Estonia and on the Polish-Ukrainian border.

This military positioning needs to be combined with the imposition of severe sanctions against Russia and with the financial crippling of the oligarchs that prop up Putin.

President Putin is an extraordinarily vain man. Therefore, targeting his wealth, his palace on the Black Sea and the oligarchs that flatter his vanity would likely destroy him. Such a strategy, if implemented quickly and effectively, might even drive him to suicide, the ultimate act of narcissism.

Anthony Britneff
Victoria

Make Putin pay for Ukraine war crimes

For much of the past week, most of us have been captured by the horror being inflicted on the people of Ukraine by Russia’s contemporary czar Vladimir Putin. With a ten-earlier-hour time differential to that here on the West Coast, we’re getting the news of the living and the dead from strange-to-the-tongue places like Kyiv, Odessa, Mariupol, et al, and getting that news around the clock.

A retired soldier myself, I’m stunned to see Ukrainian school-age children reduced to making Molotov cocktails for use against Russian tanks. I’m also struck by the evident courage of the Ukrainian people of all ilks to once again defend themselves and their homes against another rapacious invasion from the East.

Churchill-like, Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy has called his people to arms, challenging them to fight the Russian invaders in the streets, forests, fields and the modest hills of Ukraine. NATO and the European Union are steeling themselves up to doing everything possible to help the Ukrainians; everything, that is, short of war. Some aid is getting to them, but they’ll need much, much more.

There is, however, something else we could do. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a war crime. Putin should be detained or grabbed any way that we can get our hands on him and delivered in handcuffs to the International Court of Justice in den Hague, the Netherlands.

The IJC specifically exists to bring war criminals like Putin before the bar of justice to answer for their crimes against humanity. The immediate challenge, though, is not just getting custody of Putin, but rather to first have an arrest warrant issued by a recognized national authority and then having its national court refer the case to the IJC. Canada could be that authority.

I do understand there is a minefield of jurisdictional ambiguities to my proposal, but short of starting a bigger war, we just have to start somewhere. Surely the ordinary people of Ukraine deserve that much from us? Is there a lawyer out there willing and able to pitch in?

W.J. (Bill) McCullough (Colonel, ret’d)
Nanaimo

Appeasement will stop Russia, or containment?

Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukriane has eerie parallels with Germany’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia at the 1938 Munich conference under the policy of appeasement. Less than a year later the Second World War started. Today’s appeasement policy would be “a rap on the knuckles”-minor financial sanctions.

After the war, the West used containment against the USSR. Forty-six years later, the Wall came down. Today’s serious containment policy would include personal boycotts of Russian goods, financial pain to Russian banking, high-tech exports etc., and Russia’s exclusion from all international sports, scientific and cultural events.

Do Western leaders and the public choose appeasement, hoping Russia does not invade a NATO country? Our do we choose serious containment?

Mike Wilmut
Victoria

No substitute for in-person friendship

A Times Colonist obit made me smile on Sunday. Did you see it? Americk Bhandar? What a tribute.

I met her a couple of years ago when I was taking my 99-year-old mother to the Sunset Lodge adult-day-care program before the pandemic started.

One week, I arrived to take my mum home and the two women were sitting together on a couch, holding hands, heads leaning toward each other and talking away and laughing, as if they were old friends — even though they had only met each other once a week for a few months.

I stood back and watched and didn’t dare disturb. As we were leaving, Americk looked at my mum, waved and called out: “I love you, Thelma.” I could absolutely tell it was a phrase the woman had said often in her life. My mum blew her a kiss and called back: “I love you too my friend.” Americk turned to the rest of the group, nodded toward my mum, smiled and said: “She’s my sister.” Genuine connections are rare in your late 90s. We were happy that my mum found a friend in that terrifically led group.

I would accompany my mom from the parking lot with her walker and Americk was usually arriving just ahead or behind us — with her walker and escorted by her son. I felt an unspoken kinship in that we were both lucky in our caretaker roles. Not many of us will end up as charming and happy in our final years as these two elderly women. At a distance, some people may have seen them as two old women with hints of dementia. But anyone who knew them knew better. To use an old expression, these two nonagenarian gals were a couple of pistols. Americk’s obit told me that.

As a stranger really, I want to acknowledge the very large loss to Americk’s family. But despite the sadness of the occasion, when I saw her picture, I smiled at the recollection of her shiny spark. Her family had a magnificent mom and I imagine the memory of her will be well-preserved and continue to guide her family.

Thelma Fayle (Jr.)
Victoria

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