Nigel Farage is criticised for his statement that the West provoked the Ukraine war
- Author, Becky Morton
- Role, Political reporter
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Nigel Farage has been criticised for claiming that the West “provoked” the Russian invasion of Ukraine by expanding the military alliance between the European Union and NATO eastwards.
The chairman of Reform UK told the BBC that the war was “of course” President Vladimir Putin’s fault.
However, he added that the expansion of the EU and NATO gave him a “reason” to tell the Russian people that “they are after us again”.
Conservative Home Secretary James Cleverly said Farage was repeating Putin’s “vile justification” of the war, and the Labour Party branded him “unfit” for any political office.
The former UKIP leader later said he was one of the “few people” who had been “consistent and honest” on the issue.
“I said I don’t like him as a person but I admire him as a political activist because he managed to take over the leadership of Russia,” Farage said.
Mr Farage said he had argued since the 1990s that the “perpetual eastward expansion” of the NATO-EU military alliance gave President Putin “a reason to tell his Russian people they are after us again and to go to war”.
He added: “We provoked this war. Of course it is (President Putin’s) fault.”
Labour defence spokesman John Healey said Mr Farage’s comments made him “unfit for any political office in our country, let alone for the leadership of a serious party in Parliament.”
Former NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson accused Mr Farage of “parroting the Kremlin line” and “inventing new excuses for the brutal, unprovoked attack”.
During the interview, the chairman of Reform UK claimed that Lord Robertson agreed that EU enlargement was the cause of the war.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight, the Labour peer denied making the comment and described Mr Farage’s statement as “utter nonsense”.
“To say we provoked Russia is like saying that when you buy an alarm system you are in some way provoking burglars.”
Guy Verhofstadt, a prominent Belgian MEP and frequent critic of Mr Farage, also accused him of repeating “arguments from the Kremlin”.
“In the European Parliament, Farage has always defended Putin,” he said.
“Every vote for Farage will be celebrated in Moscow!”
After the interview aired on Friday, Mr Farage said on X (formerly Twitter) that he was “one of the few figures who has been consistent and honest about the war with Russia”.
In addition to the new statement, he also published a 2014 speech to the European Parliament in which he called on the West to “stop playing war games with Putin.”
Russia launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It had previously occupied Crimea and Donbass in 2014.
However, after the Russian invasion, the country applied to join both blocs.
NATO was founded in 1949 by 12 countries, including the United States, Great Britain, Canada and France.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many Eastern European countries joined the Union, including Hungary, Poland and Estonia.
Since the 1990s, the EU has also expanded; in 2004, several Eastern European countries joined.
In the interview, Farage also accused the Conservatives of not being convincing on Brexit.
As leader of UKIP, he was a key figure in the campaign to leave the EU.
While the issue dominated the 2019 general election and Boris Johnson campaigned with the slogan “Get Brexit Done”, it does not play a major role in the current election campaign.
Asked if he stood by his earlier claim that Brexit had failed, Farage said: “No, it is not a failure, but we have failed to deliver.”
“This cannot be a failure. We have left the European Union. We govern ourselves now.”
However, he added: “Brexit has disappointed those who voted for it because they believed immigration numbers would fall.”
Net migration – the difference between the number of people moving to the UK and the number leaving – has risen sharply since 2021, when the UK left the EU.
The reason for this is the immigration of non-EU citizens to the United Kingdom.
Net migration reached record levels in 2022 before declining slightly the following year.
When asked if he had simply put the blame on others, Farage replied: “If you put the blame on me, it would be very, very different. Of course you didn’t do that.”
“The Conservative Party never believed in Brexit… They saw it as a political opportunity and failed to deliver on it.”
Mr Farage was also asked about his stance on climate change and whether he believed it was not actually a “crisis”.
“I think there may have been some hype about it since the late 1980s, and I think that may be wrong,” he said.
“We always talk about fear and not about solutions.”
He added: “We spend too much time hyperventilating about the problem instead of thinking practically and logically about what we can do.”
Mr Farage branded Labour and Tory parties’ net zero policies “nonsense” and claimed abandoning their climate pledges could save £30 billion a year.
The party blames a company it hired to conduct background checks on potential candidates, claiming that the company did not conduct a thorough check before announcing the election.
Asked why some people with extreme views appeared to be supporting his cause, Mr Farage said: “They are not there because of me.”
Although he is a co-founder of the party and its honorary chairman, he stressed: “I have not been involved in the day-to-day leadership of the party for over three years.
“These candidates were recruited before I said I would play an active role in the party.”
Mr Farage took over the leadership of the Reform Party from Richard Tice only in the second full week of the election campaign.
The BBC is interviewing the leading politicians of the major parties in the run-up to the election in the Panorama interviews with Nick Robinson. The interview with Nigel Farage was broadcast on BBC One at 7pm on Friday and is available on BBC iPlayer.
For a full list of candidates in the Clacton constituency, see Here.
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