I agree with the June 29 opinion column “Stop double standard; tell truth about Ukraine.” [Recorder, June 9]. I really worry — not so much for myself as for my children and grandchildren — that if we don’t, we’ll sleepwalk toward the ever-increasing possibility of war with Russia.

That would probably mean nuclear war, and “game over” for us, Russians, Ukrainians, and the whole planet.

Remember that recent film “Don’t Look Up” about the asteroid threatening to collide with the earth and end all life, and no one would pay attention? It was a metaphor for the real looming threats of the climate crisis and nuclear war.

I oppose Russian aggression to bring about regime change in Ukraine, just as I have opposed my country’s wars and interventions in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and all too many other countries. But the stakes are too high. Not just for the Ukrainian soldiers and people who are suffering tremendous losses but for everyone on the planet if this war escalates and spins out of control.

It’s time for the U.S., NATO, and Ukraine to negotiate an end to this war that will protect the security of all parties, including Russia’s understandable concerns about NATO enlargement to its borders. I’d rather see them compromise on some of the territory in the Donbass and Crimea, at least for now, than try to get it back militarily and only face more death and destruction.

There are millions of Russian-speaking Ukrainians living in the Donbass who felt so threatened by the hostile actions of their government in 2014 and 2015 that they began to fight back. That was after a democratically elected, pro-Russian, and pro-neutrality government was overthrown by street protests that our country may well have been funding and fomenting.

Independent western journalists — some of whom were living in Donetsk city and elsewhere in the Donbass in 2014, and still do — have documented great discrimination and brutality, including war crimes, by Ukraine’s government and military toward their countrymen in this civil war. This is part of the full truth behind this war that needs to be told.

John Berkowitz

Northampton

]]>