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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Comment
Simon Jenkins

Farage’s Ukraine comments were hardly offensive – other party leaders could use a history lesson

Nigel Farage appears on the BBC’s Panorama Interviews with Nick Robinson last week.
Nigel Farage appears on the BBC’s Panorama Interviews with Nick Robinson last week. Photograph: BBC/Getty Images

Is Nigel Farage guilty as charged? An appeaser, a disgrace, an apologist for Putin, an insult to Ukraine, says a chorus of British party leaders on the election campaign trail. They are clearly delighted to hurl abuse at the surging Reform party, an attack that does not involve spending public money.

What Farage said was that Nato and the EU bore some responsibility for Putin’s attack on Ukraine, through its 20-year-old “provocation” of Moscow – extending Nato membership to encircle Russia’s national boundary. It had broken the old rule: “Don’t poke the Russian bear, it tends to react.”

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