The British political establishment completely collapsed on Friday when Reform UK leader Nigel Farage suggested that Western expansionist policies in Ukraine had “provoked” Russian aggression, despite sentiments previously expressed by NATO’s secretary-general and senior leadership in Kiev.
In an apparent renewed attempt to tarnish the Brexit campaign with false claims of Russian influence, top British politicians and media figures are again trying to use the Russia issue to sabotage support for Nigel Farage as his Reform Party surges in the polls ahead of the July 4 general election.
Mr Farage sparked the furore in an interview with BBC Panorama published on Friday, in which he said: “In 2014 he stood up in the European Parliament and said: ‘There will be war in Ukraine’. Why would he say that? It was clear that the continued expansion of NATO and the European Union eastwards was giving the Russian people an excuse to start a war by saying: ‘They’re coming at us again’.”
“We started this war. Of course, it’s his fault. He’s making excuses for our actions.”
Such sentiments are taboo in Britain, where both mainstream parties in Westminster largely support the Ukraine war, of which Britain is the biggest donor, so it is no surprise that both the Conservative and Labour parties were quick to condemn Farage’s comments.
Nigel Farage reiterated his claim to blame the West and Nato for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, telling the BBC.
He also acknowledged that he had previously said he “respected” Vladimir Putin as a politician.
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Conservative Home Secretary James Cleverley Accused Mr Farage accused the Brexit leader of “repeating Putin’s vile justification for the brutal invasion of Ukraine”, while Labour’s defence spokesman John Healey said his comments made Mr Farage “unfit to hold any political office in our country, let alone lead a respectable party in Parliament”.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak, who faces a historic election defeat over Farage’s decision to return to political power, said the Reform UK Party leader was “completely wrong” and his comments were “playing into Putin’s hands”.
“This man is spraying nerve gas on British streets and doing business with countries like North Korea. This appeasement is dangerous to Britain’s security, the security of our allies who rely on us, and will only embolden Putin further,” Sunak added.
Sir Keir Starmer, Labour’s leader of the opposition and likely to become the next Prime Minister, echoed Mr Sunak, saying Mr Farage’s comments were “disgraceful”.
“Anyone who runs for parliament should make it really clear that Russia is the aggressor, President Putin is responsible, and that we stand on Ukraine’s side as we have from the beginning of this conflict, and that parliament has spoken out in unison on this issue since the beginning of the conflict,” the left leader said. Said.
“Nigel Farage was completely wrong.”
Rishi Sunak responded to the Reform UK Party leader’s claim that the West “provoked” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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However, Farage’s diagnosis that attempts to expand both the European Union and NATO to Russia’s doorstep played a role in provoking the 2022 invasion of Ukraine has been expressed earlier by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg himself, who seemed to boast that the invasion had made NATO expansion more realistic and therefore backfired against Putin’s desire to halt the expansion of the US-led alliance.
Speaking to the European Parliament in September 2023, Stoltenberg said: Said“The background to that is that President Putin declared in the fall of 2021 and actually sent a draft treaty to NATO to sign, promising not to expand NATO any further. That’s what he sent us. And that was a precondition for not invading Ukraine. Of course, we didn’t sign it.”
“The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign a pledge never to expand NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure from all allies that have been in NATO since 1997 – half of NATO, all of Central and Eastern Europe. We should remove NATO from that part of the alliance and introduce something like a B-class, second-class member state. We refused. So he went to war to prevent NATO, and even NATO, from getting closer to our borders. He got exactly the opposite result.”
Even members of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s team seemed to realize before the invasion that joining a Western military alliance would likely provoke war with Russia, with former senior adviser Oleksiy Arestovich saying: To tell According to IntelliNews in 2019, Russia said that “the price of joining NATO is a 99.9 percent chance of a major war with Russia,” but Arestovich argued that this was a price worth paying, otherwise Russia would simply try to “absorb” Ukraine in the coming years anyway.
Mr Farage responded to the outrage over his comments: Said“I am one of the few people who has been consistently honest about the war with Russia. Putin was wrong to invade sovereign nations, and the EU was wrong to expand eastward. The sooner we realize this, the closer we will be to ending the war and bringing peace.”
Farage: Ukraine war never happened under Trump, dangerous world needs his returnhttps://t.co/9vZ2kDpVdu
—Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) January 16, 2024
