We must not allow Nigel Farage to run away from his record on Ukraine

Nigel Farage has done another of those interviews for the Times magazine: the cigar-chomping, pint-swilling man of the hour, batting off controversy like flies; the flattering photo in tailored suit and Union Jack socks; and as ever, the piece is angled around his political fortunes. (Headline: “Will I be the next PM? There’s a good chance.”)

It’s rather late in the day to be doing this, and to be asking the Reform UK leader about his “worrying” or “concerning” remarks, instead of confronting him with enough racist quotes to fill a London cab. The nightmare across the Atlantic should be a warning of where this media breakdown ends. But as we hurtle towards the local elections in May, where Reform is looking to pick Labour’s bones, one Farage free pass needs special attention. 

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Yet again Farage tried to brush away his praise for Vladimir Putin, and his excuses for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, telling the Times: “This is a load of cobblers.” Or as he told Talk TV recently: “They’re absolutely desperate. They’re gonna throw as much mud as they can, but it’s just not gonna stick.” On Russia, it’s Farage who has been throwing the desperate mud. 

In 2014, Nigel Farage was asked by GQ to name the world leader he most admired. Farage said: “As an operator, but not as a human being, I would say Putin. The way he played the whole Syria thing. Brilliant. Not that I approve of him politically.” 

At the time, Putin had just rescued Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad from a US military reply to its use of chemical weapons, by offering to verify they had been destroyed. Spoiler: They never were, and Russia’s arming of Assad, and later bombing Syria directly, kept the civil war there going for another decade. Brilliant! After he was finally overthrown last year, Assad flew directly to Moscow, where he was granted political asylum.

So this wasn’t just praise for a dictator, but praise for a dictator supporting a dictator. And the resulting ISIS terrorism and refugee crisis were a free gift to racist demagogues in Europe and the US. (Farage has repeatedly called on the west to make common cause with Putin against “global jihadism”, a fight where he claims “we’re on the same side”.)

Speaking of Europe, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, Farage was livid. Feeling the spirit of Churchill move upon him, our own British Bulldog got up on his hind legs and blamed… the EU! 

In Nigel’s telling, the European Union had provoked Putin by “feeding an entirely unrealistic dream” of future membership for Ukraine, which “encouraged” Ukrainians to “topple a legitimate president”. That’s one way of putting it. Viktor Yanukovych had been busy shooting protesters in Maidan Square, who opposed his ditching an EU association agreement in favour of closer ties with Russia. Ukrainians suspected Putin had designs on their country. Fancy that! He was kicked out of office by Ukraine’s parliament, and fled to – yep, you guessed it – Moscow. 

Yet Farage declared “the EU has blood on its hands”, adding that “if you poke the Russian bear with a stick he will respond” – an insult to Russians and bears alike. I thought Mr Brexit supported parliamentary sovereignty, and countries deciding whether to be part of the EU? 

Apparently not. Nigel Farage told the European parliament that September: “This EU empire, ever seeking to expand, stated its territorial claim on the Ukraine some years ago.” Mark this: the expanding empire here is not Russia, but the EU.

When challenged, Farage said: “There should be a huge degree of guilt in this house about what provoked all of this in the first place. We saw western Ukrainians waving European flags, rioting, setting fire to things and effectively staging a coup d’état which brought down the Ukrainian president, leading to this instability.” This is not detached analysis – it’s a clear opposition to what Ukrainians call their “revolution of dignity”. 

On the eve of Russia’s 2022 invasion, Nigel Farage wrote in the Telegraph: “Russia, with its painful history of being invaded, has always been more fearful of the west than the west is of Russia.” You’re thinking of spiders, Nigel. 

He argued for ruling our NATO membership for Ukraine – an odd time to do that – and when the war started he called it “a consequence of EU and NATO expansion”. Last year he called on the west to negotiate with Putin, adding that “the relentless insistence on continued war is worrying”. Whose insistence, Nigel? 

OK, why is the great super-patriot going out of his way to defend Russian imperialism? An overlooked insight into Farage’s mind came in a 2018 interview with US conspiracy nut Alex Jones. Farage told Jones that “mass immigration” is part of a left-wing plot to “abolish the nation-state” and “replace it with the globalist project, and the European Union is the prototype for the New World Order”. This is tinfoil hat territory. 

But he wasn’t done: “The globalists have wanted to have some form of conflict with Russia as an argument for us all to surrender our national sovereignty and give it up to a higher global level. They’ve wanted it for years, and now they see their opportunity. And we must resist.”

This is the paranoid drivel of the extreme right, complete with shadowy “globalists” conspiring to start wars. And again, Putin is cast as the victim, rather than (to quote the comedian Peter Cook about Hitler) “a consummate aggressor”, from Chechnya and Georgia to Syria and Ukraine, with death squads in Africa and assassins in Europe. 

This conspiracy theory helps decode Farage’s position on Russia, his cranky version of Brexit, and his whole sorry career of spreading racist propaganda. In Farage’s mind, it’s all part of “resisting” a left-wing/Islamic/globalist plot to destroy the British nation. 

In these local elections, voters should know Reform’s position on Ukraine is not a quirk or a sideshow. Farage makes excuses for Russian fascism because it mirrors his own politics. Far from being “a load of cobblers”, the shoe (or jackboot) fits, and he should be made to wear it. 

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