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.”
Why Farage revived this maxim might have to do with his tardy arrival on the election scene, and his need for a big headline. In fact, he was merely joining the school of “neo-realists” who have emerged in response to a sequence of inept western interventions in conflicts across the continent of Asia. Politicians such as America’s Donald Trump and various European populists are preaching a new isolationism. One conflict from which they would like the west to detach itself is Ukraine. It is a conflict that has become a classic stalemate.
The Farage line is familiar to anyone who took part in the seminar fest that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The newly liberated Russians said with one voice, you have won but do not push Moscow too far. The Kremlin expert George Kennan warned the west not to revel in its victory. It would hand Russia over to the chauvinist – and belligerent – rightwingers. Moscow’s leader at the time, Mikhail Gorbachev, pleaded with Nato not to extend its membership to the countries bordering Russia. Let them be neutral, as Finland was. Archives show that this non-extension was agreed and verbally promised by the US and others.
Within a decade, Nato was negotiating with potential new members in the Baltic states and the Black Sea. On coming to power in 2000, Putin realised this and sought membership of Nato himself. This came to nothing. But western statesmen such as Henry Kissinger continued to preach against inflaming Russian nationalism, not least over Ukraine, motherland of medieval Russia.
But ultimately the west behaved with care. It did nothing to provoke Russia over its brutality in Chechnya or its invasion and annexation of Georgian territory in 2008. It remained an observer in 2014 over Russia’s reoccupation of Crimea and the invasion of Ukrainian Donbas. It certainly did not seriously contemplate admitting Ukraine to Nato, which would have unquestionably been provocative. If there was some historic validity in Farage’s charge of provocation, it is surely spent by now.
The west’s failure to help create a new European Russia in the 1990s may rank as one of the great miscalculations of the postwar age. But a more immediate miscalculation must be Putin’s attempt to topple President Zelenskiy in a dash to Kyiv. The west’s urgent task must be to get Putin off his self-impaled hook, to stop the bombing and killing. Those now mooting a settlement seem to agree that this will involve the partial division of Ukraine along a ceasefire line and some redefinition of its eastern regions.
This cannot be helped by British politicians seeking votes by demanding “total victory” on headline-hunting trips to Kyiv. Nor is it helped by heaping insults on anyone who, like Farage in his other remarks, is clearly arguing for peace.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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