There is much talk of how the west should look to its own supposed violations of law before preaching to the postcolonial world over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (“West should look at its own violation of the law”, Letters, March 31).

Presumably these violations include the ousting of the ethnic cleansing despots of Serbia such as Slobodan Milosevic, the deposing of Saddam Hussein (who used chemical weapons on his own people), the expulsion for 20 years from power of the Taliban (whose record on women’s rights is medieval), the prevention of mass killings in Benghazi in 2011 and the actions against Isis who make the Russian army in Ukraine seem civilised?

Perhaps a few more such “violations” in the past few years (in Syria, for example, after the use of chemical weapons) may have caused Vladimir Putin’s regime to refrain from its current actions in Ukraine.

The west may not have always acted perfectly but as one former president of Georgia said, why did his country have to have the Russian empire as its master. Why could it not have been the British?

Guy Gibson
St Annes-On-Sea, Lancashire, UK