I take issue with John Bond’s letter (Oxford Mail, June 7). Ukrainians are deluding themselves if they think that the “European values” he quotes are the same as those of the EU. 

We know what happens in the EU when people vote the “wrong way”. They are made to vote again, as in the case of the second Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty; or in the case of the French and Dutch rejection of the EU Constitution when it was repackaged as the Lisbon Treaty. So much for the integrity Mr Bond refers to.

In 2013 Mr Cameron made a speech in Kazakhstan in which he said he wanted the EU to stretch from the Atlantic to the Urals. The Urals are in Russia! 

Mr Cameron clearly had in mind the incorporation of Ukraine into the EU. The Russians have a right to be suspicious.

In the last 200-odd years, there have been two major invasions of Russia from the West, under Napoleon and Hitler. Now the USA has missiles on the Polish border. No wonder Putin is edgy.

During the recent overthrow of the democratically-elected President of Ukraine, senior diplomats and politicians from Europe and America visited Kiev to support this uprising – an outrageous interference in another country’s affairs. 

If I were Ukrainian I would be just as suspicious of being absorbed into the EU superstate as of Putin’s Russia.

Britain does not have an argument with Russia, and I do not want to see British troops forced, for example, to fight Russia as part of the EU Army (to be announced shortly after our Referendum). That is one reason I am voting to Leave.

STEPHEN NASH
Washington Terrace, 
Middle Barton