Nigel Farage has just proven that he’s not a serious leader
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Nigel Farage’s analysis of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine could hardly be more wrong. He claims that Nato and EU expansion was provocative. In fact it was Western weakness and timidity that encouraged Putin’s aggression in 2022. Rather than making any attempt to oppose Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014, or helping Ukraine to do so, Western governments called on Kyiv to take no action that might lead to escalation. In spirit, it was a foreshadowing of Joe Biden’s offer in February 2022 to give President Zelensky a ride out of Ukraine.
When Putin saw the West was unwilling to confront him, he rapidly followed up with aggression in the Donbas. In the face of that, Europe desperately sought to revert as soon as possible to business as usual with Russia, even taking steps to increase energy dependence. Seeing he had nothing to fear, an assessment reinforced by Nato’s abandonment of Afghanistan, Putin returned to the charge in Ukraine in February 2022.
To give credence to Putin’s frequently trotted out excuse for starting this war is, to say the least, naive. Farage says that he admires him as a “political operator”. Well, the political operator understood only too well that Russia had nothing to fear militarily from Nato, having rubbed shoulders with the heads of Western governments for so many years. Not one of them has any aggressive instinct let alone intent.
Quite the reverse. As we have seen repeatedly in the pusillanimous responses from both Europe and the US to the 2022 invasion, with pretty much whatever Ukraine has needed to fight back being provided reluctantly, inadequately and with crippling restrictions, if at all. If Putin has any genuine fear of Nato’s eastward expansion, why has he withdrawn 80 per cent of Russian forces from the border with Finland shortly after it joined the alliance?
Beyond his imperialist motivations to recreate a greater Russia with him as Tsar, what Putin did actually fear was a democratic Ukraine and a Ukraine that has benefited increasingly from alignment with the West. He recognised the dangers to his own regime of growing economic prosperity just across the border, with the potential to create envy inside Russia that could lead to popular challenges to his repressive authority as he leads his country into economic decline and marginalisation on the world stage.
A serious political leader should not parrot the talking points of Vladimir Putin. Instead Farage should be encouraging our country and the West to stand up to this dictator against his criminal assault on a sovereign state. We have seen the consequences of appeasement play out over the last two years in Ukraine, and we can be sure that anything short of Russian defeat there will inevitably lead to even greater aggression and bloodshed in Europe in the future.
