The West’s mistakes in Ukraine were catastrophic. I will not apologize for telling the truth

Don’t blame me for telling the truth about Putin’s war in Ukraine. Facing the facts about the mistakes of the past must be the first step towards the peaceful future we all want to see.

In my BBC Panorama interview on Friday, Nick Robinson brazenly accused me of “parroting” Russian President Vladimir Putin’s apologies for invading Ukraine, and the political establishment has been busy repeating that insult ever since.

So let me be clear: I am not and have never been an apologist or supporter of Putin. His invasion of Ukraine was immoral, outrageous and indefensible. As a champion of national sovereignty, I believe that Putin’s invasion of sovereign Ukraine was completely wrong. No one can rightly accuse me of being an appeaser. I have never tried to justify Putin’s invasion in any way, and I do not do so now.

But that does not change the fact that I saw it coming a decade ago, warned about it, and am one of the few politicians who has always been correct and honest in his assessment of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

What I have been saying for ten years is that the West played into Putin’s hands by giving him an excuse to do what he wanted to do anyway.

Back in 2014, when the EU first offered Ukraine an accession agreement, I said in a speech to the European Parliament: “There will be a war in Ukraine.” Why? Because the expansion of NATO and the European Union gave Putin a pretext that he could not ignore.

As I have made clear on several occasions since then, if you provoke the Russian bear with a stick, don’t be surprised if it responds. And if you have neither the means nor the political will to confront it, provoking the bear is obviously not good foreign policy.

Although he denied it on the radio last night (Friday), former Labour minister and later NATO chief George Robertson also recently made it clear that Putin’s fears of EU enlargement contributed to the outbreak of war. He made the point – twice – in his article in the New Statesman in May and in a BBC interview in February this year.

And it’s not just Ukraine. The West’s diplomatic blunder on how to deal with Putin’s mix of paranoia and assertiveness was just one of many disastrous interventions in the two decades since Tony Blair’s Labour government took part in the disastrous invasion of Iraq (which I opposed).

Too often, Western leaders have tried to dress up in white cowboy hats and portray themselves as heroes saving the world. We have seen vanity replace reason in foreign policy, leading to the destabilisation of a number of countries, with disastrous consequences both there and here.

We should remember that at about the same time as tensions with Russia were escalating, US President Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, with the full support of the conservative government of David Cameron, were turning Libya into a smoking ruin in an effort to overthrow the dictator Gaddafi.

I have repeatedly pointed out the dangers of Western foreign policy. It gives me no pleasure to say that I was right and the Tories and Labour were wrong.

Of course I understand that many Britons feel great sympathy for the resilient Ukrainians. The fog of war always makes it difficult to establish exact casualty figures, but US intelligence sources suggested last year that nearly half a million people had been killed or wounded on both sides of the conflict. The conflict is a meat grinder for Ukrainian and Russian soldiers, and there is no end to the carnage in sight.

Britain alone has pledged £12.5 billion in military and other aid to Ukraine. The war has also had a drastic impact on the European and British economies, contributing to sharp increases in all costs – from energy and food prices to interest rates – exacerbating the cost of living crisis that has hit millions of struggling British households.

There is no easy solution to the war. But facing the truth about the causes and consequences must be a start. That is why I simply want to tell the truth as it is, and I have been doing so for a decade. The detractors who claim that telling the truth makes me a “mouthpiece for Putin” only reveal the weakness of their own argument.

This is also about British democracy. The escalation of British support for the war in Ukraine has not even been an issue in this election campaign, because the old parties are all in agreement with it. As leader of Reform UK, a party currently in second place in the main polls, am I not allowed to question this political conformism for once?

What genuine democratic choice could there be when we are all expected to say the same thing and are vilified if we refuse to do so? At election time, more than ever, free speech is the lifeblood of our democracy.

My question to voters is: who would you trust most to shape Britain’s future foreign policy? Me, who saw the devastating wars in Ukraine and elsewhere coming and warned repeatedly about them? Or the established parties who helped bring them about?