IF Croatia had the right (with the help of arms and finance from Kohl's Germany) to secede from Yugoslavia, and the Southern Sudan had the right to secede from the Muslim north (and indeed, if Scotland has the right to secede from the United Kingdom), why then has the ethnically Russian eastern Ukraine, not the right to secede from that country?

Has the illogical and increasingly hysterical reaction to these events, with such as David Cameron comparing Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler, possibly something to do with deflecting attention from the much more disastrous interventions of the cohorts of western imperialism in that swathe of country from Libya to Afghanistan, which have turned the region into a vast supra-national failed state?

Ian R Mitchell,

21 Woodside Terrace,

Glasgow.