Nigel
Farage claims Russia was provoked into Ukraine war
Farage, who
has long been accused of being a Putin apologist, tells BBC Moscow was given
excuse by EU and Nato eastern expansion
Peter Walker
Senior political correspondent
Fri 21 Jun
2024 19.20 BST
Nigel Farage
has said the EU and Nato “provoked” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by expanding
eastwards, as the Reform UK leader was challenged over a series of policies and
beliefs in a sometimes combative TV interview.
Speaking to
BBC’s Panorama on Friday evening, Farage also said Brexit would have benefited
the UK economically if he had been running the country, and that many of the
Reform candidates criticised for saying offensive things had been “stitched up
in the most extraordinary way”.
Challenged
on his beliefs over the invasion of Ukraine, and his stated admiration for
Vladimir Putin, Farage said he disliked the Russian president personally but
“admired him as a political operator” because of the extent of his control over
Russia.
On why Putin
invaded Ukraine, Farage said: “I stood up in the European parliament in 2014
and I said: ‘There will be a war in Ukraine.’ Why did I say that? It was
obvious to me that the ever-eastward expansion of Nato and the European Union
was giving this man a reason … to say: ‘They’re coming for us again,’ and to go
to war.”
He added:
“We provoked this war. Of course it’s his fault, he’s used what we’ve done as
an excuse.”
The
Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats have long accused Farage of
being an apologist for the Russian president.
James
Cleverly, the home secretary, criticised Farage’s comments, saying he was
“echoing Putin’s vile justification for the brutal invasion of Ukraine”, while
the former defence secretary Ben Wallace said the Reform leader was voicing
“sympathy” to someone who “deployed nerve agents on the streets of Britain”.
John Healey,
the shadow defence secretary, called the comments “disgraceful”, adding that
Farage has “shown that he would rather lick Vladimir Putin’s boot than stand up
for the people of Ukraine. That makes him unfit for any political office in our
country, let alone leading a serious party in parliament.”
Earlier this
year Rishi Sunak said it was “clearly ridiculous” to blame the west for the
war.
Elsewhere in
the interview, one of a series hosted by Nick Robinson with party leaders,
Farage accepted that a claim he made saying the UK had moved from being the
“world’s seventh-biggest exporter to the world’s fourth-biggest exporter” after
Brexit referred only to services.
Asked why
exports in goods had not similarly benefited, Farage blamed net zero policies,
saying they had “de-industrialised Britain”. On the economic effects of Brexit,
he said: “If you put me in charge it’d be very, very different, but of course
they didn’t do that did they?”
Challenged
over his support at the time for Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget, Farage
praised it for having “a lot of things here that were pro-growth and
pro-business”, while saying it was undermined by not including matched cuts in
spending.
Asking about
Reform’s own fiscal plans, set out this week in the party’s manifesto, Robinson
seemed unconvinced by Farage’s explanations as to how the party would cut
public spending enough to make mass tax cuts.
“Well,
number one, we will get people off the unemployment register into work,” Farage
said. Robinson replied: “That’s not going to raise you £140bn a year. You were
on I’m a Celebrity – you should have been on Fantasy Island.”
Discussing
migration, Farage repeatedly said that people arriving in the UK could bring
their mothers with them, which is not the case. On net zero, asked if he still
believed King Charles was “an eco-loony”, Farage replied: “He wasn’t the king
then, and I can’t speak ill of the monarch obviously.”
Robinson
also questioned Farage about comments from a series of Reform’s election
candidates, including one who said the UK should have taken Adolf Hitler’s
“offer of neutrality” instead of fighting the Nazis.
Reform has
since blamed a vetting company it employed for failing to check what candidates
had said. But Farage appeared to play down the seriousness of many of the
comments, saying: “We’ve also had an awful lot of candidates being stitched up
in the most extraordinary way with quotes being taken out of context.”
Robinson
replied: “So, you can’t run vetting but you could find £140bn in public
spending savings?”
Asked if
Reform attracted such people because of his own views, Farage called this
“cobblers, absolute cobblers”, quoting Martin Luther King and saying he
believed in meritocracy.
Asked why he
once praised Enoch Powell and criticised Rishi Sunak by saying he “doesn’t
understand our culture”, Farage said this simply referred to the prime minister
being “too upper-class”.
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