Stockpile diapers, medication, baby food: NATO members Sweden and Finland advise citizens on how to survive war

[Emrys]

18. Without wishing to seem patronizing, thank you. You very much get it.

Ukraine is close to my heart, not least because of my very active involvement years ago in the peace/anti-nuclear/disarmament movement.

When Ukraine chose to give up its nuclear weapons (albeit it didn't have the infrastructure capacity to maintain them, let alone a reason at the time to contemplate needing to threaten to use them), we applauded it because we hoped it would be a model for wider disarmament and de-escalation.

The reneging on the defence treaty agreements of the time - blatantly by the Russians, less so by the USA but no less disappointingly, and a little more defensibly by the UK as another party - leaves me in the uncomfortable position that I would be hard put to encourage other countries to follow suit nowadays, and couldn't blame the Ukrainians if they decided to develop their own nuclear armaments.

We are, unfortunately, where we are now. I'm pacifist by nature, a kind of Joan Baez pacifist (see "What would you do if?" ) who if faced with the inter-state dilemmas we've allowed to develop, can't say much except these were probably avoidable if we'd have behaved differently in years past. But we didn't, and now we can't flinch when we reap what we've sown, and we have to react as we see best in the hope it may work out better than if we don't.