1/ What bothers me most about the "Russia Report" is an underlying presumption that Russia is an enemy, a hostile state, which poses some sort of (always undefined) threat to our "democracy". Because this is an unspoken presumption it requires no evidence, ...

2/ and no evidence is ever offered. It is a return to Cold War mentality in which any statement in favour of "the enemy" is deemed to be unpatriotic and therefore the person making that statement is an (unwitting?) enemy agent. ...

3/ This was bad enugh when there were real ideological differences between communist anti-capitalist states and "democratic" capitalist states. But there is now no ideological difference. Russia has a mixed economy as do most western countries. ...

4/ Russia has a relatively small military budget and no policies of global domination - in contrast with the US which has an obscenely large military budget and bullies smaller nations all around the world. ...

5/ NATO as a military alliance has no preceptible defence role since it faces no credible enemy. As a result, to justify its continued existence, it is overtly aggressive as in its war against Serbia in 1999, in Afghanistan from 2002, and ...

6/ in support of an illegal regime in Ukraine from 2014. This has to stop or it will end in tears - or global nuclear armageddon. Part of stopping it MUST be to stop the shrill "Russia Russia Russia" hysteria - and the parallel "China China China" hysteria. ...

7/ Hong Kong is an integral part of China. Crimea is an integral part of Russia because its residents decided overwhelmingly that it should be. Those are facts. Live with them. They are none of our business in the UK or the US. ...

8/ Hong Kong should never have been a UK colony: it only became so after the outrageous Opium Wars which resulted from Chinese resistance to the UK peddling narcotics to the Chinese. ...

9/ As for human rights, the US and UK would do well to follow the wise biblical advice: "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone". Unilateral sanctions are not the way to resolve any issues. They are illegal economic warfare and collective punishment of whole countries.