READING contributions from David Crawford (Letters, June 15 and 17 June) and Brian Quail (Letters, June 16) was akin to entering some sort of parallel universe.

Mr Crawford's first letter warned that RAF flights over the Baltic were designed to "deliberately provoke" Russia and queried what threat they could be protecting the "Free World" from, adding that wars were caused by "a few powerful individuals simply to increase or protect their personal power or wealth". He went on to amplify this latter notion in his second letter in which he tells us that "war is always about profit", and this after conflating this notion with the United States, by his naming of two US corporations (it is apparently surprising and presumably sinister to him that Ford could have established a plant in pre-war Germany). Mr Crawford seems to be unaware of the myriad wars caused though nationalism, ethnicity and religion and is oblivious of the fact that the increased Nato presence in the Baltic is a consequence of invitations from the three Baltic countries, fellow members of the EU and of Nato, who are deeply troubled by resurgent Russian nationalism and the events in the Ukraine, not to mention the increasing activity of Russian forces exercising in the Baltic area. In addition, the Russians have been quietly equipping its Baltic enclave, Kaliningrad, with state-of-the art weaponry.

Meanwhile one fears that Mr Quail has been somewhat carried away with his involvement with a Russian choir and his association with the Russian Consul General when he bizarrely warns us that we must resist "Nato's current drive to war in the Ukraine", glossing over the fact that Russia invaded the Ukraine, annexing the Crimea and is currently fighting a proxy war in the east of Ukraine.

This week President Putin announced that more than 40 new intercontinental ballistic missiles would be added to his nuclear arsenal and that he reserved the right to deploy nuclear weapons in the Crimea ("Russia beefs up arsenal", The Herald, June 17). This is all part of a massive reported £480bn modernisation programme including heavy investment in the production of what analysts agree will be the world's deadliest tank, the T14 Armata, and this at a time when most Nato countries have been running down their armed forces. Why is this? Do Messrs Crawford and Quail seriously believe that President Putin fears a Nato invasion of Russia? Or could it be more to do with Putin's lamentation that the biggest tragedy of his life was the break-up of the Soviet Union and the suspicion of a growing number of people in the West that it is his intention to try to recreate a version of it?

I suspect that Messrs Crawford and Quail would be less sanguine if they were writing from an address in Riga than from the comfort of Glasgow.

R Murray,

28 Maxwell Drive, Glasgow.