Readers respond to an article by Martin Kettle arguing that the west must find a way to live with Russia
When he says that Britain and Russia are much more alike than either would care to admit, Martin Kettle makes a telling point: both were great imperial powers and both have struggled to adapt to their relative decline (Rupture is not an option: after this war, the west must learn how to live with Russia, 10 March).
The European age of empire that first convulsed and then transformed the world in 1914 finally culminated in the horrors of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, not least in the blood-drenched lands of Ukraine and Belarus. For Vladimir Putin, the revanchist wars in Chechnya, Georgia, the Crimean peninsula and Ukraine appear part of a desire to reverse-engineer a Russian empire, using brute force to recreate a mythological past that has come to obsess him. A different path is embodied in the EU, and it is one that Volodymyr Zelenskiy craves for Ukraine. In contrast to the dead end of empire, European integration promises a commonwealth of independent nations rooted in consent, democracy, shared values and mutual cooperation in return for a degree of pooled sovereignty.
